Can Anyone Multi-Task?

Context switching is a focus killer

There’s strategic thinking and tactical thinking. I’ve done both in board games for years. This is the best move now, but this other move helps further my overall strategy. However, that move means I won’t have the resources for my strategy to even come to fruition. Better make the best move for now and live to fight another day. That balance makes sense to me. However, doing both in my career is a completely other story. With board games, it’s just a game. It lasts an hour or two (or several with some of the games I like to play). Once it’s over, your decisions don’t matter anymore. They are ephemeral. The same is not true for work. The decisions I make have lasting effects on myself, but more importantly, those around me. Those that depend on me. My wife. My future kids. My CEO. My dog. So how do you strike that same balance of the strategic and the tactical? How do you go from a high level vision discussion with the CEO to a code review with a junior engineer?

Honestly, I don’t have the answer. I’m still figuring it out, which is kind of exciting. I love to learn, but as my wife can attest, I can’t multi-task. However, I would argue that no one multi-tasks, they just context switch very quickly. They are giving partial effort on a few things. I prefer giving my full effort and attention to one thing at a time, get it out of my brain, and move on to giving my full attention to the next task. Because of this, I’ve started to write everything down. Well, not everything, but specifically those things that come up in meetings. It helps me focus on the task at hand, while still being able to switch to the next thing when that is over. I know I can come back to my notes and be able to get back in the mindset I was in at the time.

Context switching is the performance killer. When you are in deep thought working on a problem and you get that oh-so-familiar Slack *ding*, it breaks your focus (unless you’ve gotten to the point where your brain parses out that sound). You have to respond to a message from someone. It probably wasn’t even as important as what you were doing. Then it seems like it takes forever to get back into the mindset you were in (I’ve heard up some studies say up to fifteen minutes or more, but don’t have the references to link, so don’t take my word for it). This is why it is so important to silence your notifications, and build that norm into your company culture. In the software industry (where there is a ton of thought work that requires deep focus), there are very few things that come up that are truly “drop everything right now”. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop people from panicking, pinging you, and forcing you to address the problem (or at least making you feel like you have to). Not only will you be unable to focus on the problem very well for the first few minutes after context switching, getting back to your task will take even longer, as mentioned above. Even if you can say “give me ten more minutes to finish this up”, just taking the time to message that can turn that ten minutes into thirty. To make things worse, if that other task requires a different level of thinking, then I would wager it will take even longer to switch back.

What are the different levels of thinking? So glad you asked. What I’m talking about is task level, project level, and owner level. I first heard these described on a podcast I’ve been listening to for the past few months, Startups for the Rest of Us (no affiliation). As an engineer (or employee for that matter) at an early stage startup, it is imperative that I be able to transition between all three. I have to be able to pull my head out of the weeds of code reviews and data analysis to be able to discuss how this next feature is going to advance the vision. I have to be able to interview a new engineering candidate, and then immediately go debug a production issue reported by a customer. While I don’t like the context switching, I love being a part of all of the conversations. I really enjoy being able to think at all levels. While I know that being able to execute on a vision probably requires a higher percentage of task level thinking (which often requires more focus time and less context switching to do so effectively), I still want to be doing all of them. To me, this is what makes being part of a startup so amazing. It’s not for everyone, but it’s definitely for me.

Soon, I’ll be adding another set of duties to my workday as a senior engineer, Engineering Manager. With that will come more responsibilities, but also more context switching. My note-taking will be so necessary, and I’ll probably have to find even more strategies to compartmentalize and focus. I’ve been a team lead before, and that had it’s fair share of context switching (sometimes to my breaking point), and that didn’t include any 1:1s or other manager duties. That was just being responsible for the projects the team was working on. Now, I’ll be responsible for the work, as well as making sure the team feels supported (and all the other things associated with being a leader). It sounds daunting, but I couldn’t be more excited. I’ve studied leadership for years and have so many ideas. I maybe don’t have the formal experience, but I’m thrilled to learn.