You start your day feeling excited about a project you’re going to work on for your business. You start working, and after a little while one of two things might happen:

  1. You get stuck on an idea and you’re not sure where to go with it; OR
  2. You get some sort of interruption in the middle of your working time (email alert, phone ringing, your kid needs something, etc.)

Is this scenario familiar to you? What happens NEXT?


Understand your losses

At this point, you fall down a rabbit hole of distraction. You check your email, answer the phone, browse Facebook “to get some ideas,” or even just get up and switch the laundry or start lunch because you think you need a break.

You are actively working against your own success.

You have lost time, twice:

  • The first amount is the time it took you to actually give in to that distraction (20 minute phone call, 30 minutes on Facebook, 10 minutes checking email, etc.).
  • The second amount is the time you lost switching back and forth between two tasks; this is the actual time your brain takes to catch back up when you force it into a state of context switching.

Though you might understand the first loss, it’s my guess that you didn’t even realize you were losing that second block.

Get clear.

This table illustrates Todd Herman’s research on context switching:

Time Lost to Context Switching


No matter how much time you have to complete any given task, you automatically lose more than half of it just by adding another task into that time frame. The extra 20% goes to your brain, to allow it to mentally shift gears. As you can see, adding more tasks doesn’t grow in even amounts; the amount of time you lose to context switching increases exponentially every time you add another task.

Let’s say you have one hour to write a blog post. If you give in to 5 interruptions during that hour, you’ll actually only get 3 minutes to work on that blog post out of the whole hour, and you’ll lose 48 minutes of it to context switching. No wonder it feels like you never have enough time to do your work!

Improve your Focus.

How can you solve the problem of context switching?

Make it a habit to turn off your phone, close your browsers, and tell your family members not to interrupt unless there’s an emergency when you’re working. Give yourself the time you need in order to really do your work, and you’ll be amazed at how much more time you feel like you have, because you didn’t lose it to context switching!

How will YOU give yourself the time and space you need to get your work done? If you’d like a weekly reminder to focus on your priorities and take action to move you toward your goals, sign up below for my Weekly Course of Action e-mails. Let’s tackle this, together.

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