You are in the middle of a report. Your phone buzzes. You glance at it. Just a Slack message, but you answer it real quick. Then you check email. Then you remember you need to look something up. Twenty minutes later, you are staring at the report wondering what you were doing.
Sound familiar? That is context switching in action, and it is one of the most expensive things you do to your brain every single day.
What Is Context Switching?
Context switching is what happens when your attention jumps between different tasks. Not multitasking (which is a myth for anything complex). We are talking about the constant start, stop, reorient cycle that happens when you get interrupted or interrupt yourself.
Every time you switch, your brain has to do three things:
