Transitions and Task-Switching
I’ve been enjoying working with the latest cohort of Compassionate Productivity. (You can get on the waitlist here for the next group, or click here to find out more about working with me one-to-one).
Something that’s been coming up in the group is how many people struggle with task-switching and making transitions:
Waking up and getting going in the mornings.
Moving from solitary, deep-focus working mode, to family or social mode.
Switching from a difficult meeting about a sensitive topic, to a short period of focussed work to meet an imminent deadline.
There can be a heavy burden of task-switching at times of life characterised by a lot of decision-making or caregiving.
Some people recognise that this is a specific area of difficulty - which is half the battle.
But most people experience an enhanced level of struggle with task-switching, because they misunderstand the challenge they’re experiencing.
They imagine that they are lazy, wasting time, making excuses; that their difficulties in changing attentional focus are character flaws, insufficient drive or determination.
To the original difficulty of making transitions and changing tasks, they add a generous dollop of shame and self-loathing.
But it’s well known that switching between tasks causes cognitive fatigue. It takes a lot of energy to shift between attention states and different types of mental activity.
And this can be particularly hard for people with a tendency towards monotropic thinking - that is, people who experience a cognitive intensity that inclines them to hyperfocus very deeply on one task at a time, so that it takes a lot more effort to retract all the sensitive, prehensile tentacles of their attention from one topic and start probing them into another.
People with monotropic thinking styles can also experience difficulty in pulling back from their current area of focus to see the bigger picture.
One experience you might have if you have a monotropic thinking style is that, when you are at work, the rest of your life might as well not exist, leading you to over-commit to work projects without considering your other commitments.
Similarly, when working on a hobby, your work and family and social life might drop off the radar entirely.
Or you might struggle to shift out of work mode when you get home, and continue ruminating on work issues while dissociated from your domestic environment and everyone in it.
Another potential manifestation of monotropic thinking is bringing the same attitude and focussed attention to all areas of life, without differentiation. So that you might approach work, family, hobbies and social engagements with an intensity, diligence, and feeling of high stakes, that might not serve you well in all of these activities, or allow you room for rest or pleasure. It might also make it very difficult to prioritise between tasks.
The ability to do challenging intellectual work is often correlated with some level of intensity or inflexibility of attention.
You can’t do research project or write a book without being able to hold your nose to the grindstone of an intellectual problem for a sustained period of time.
Not that this is easy, or always fun - but it’s both possible and intriguing for some people in a way that it isn’t for most of the population.
And being able to deploy attention deeply and intensely means that it’s a bigger effort to deliberately shift it.
It’s not laziness, or making excuses. It’s genuinely harder for some people than others.
But life isn’t monotropic.
Most of us need to function relatively well and fairly comfortably at work, in our families and communities, in our social lives, and in our care for our bodies and environments.
We need to be able to shift our attention between the mental activities involved in all these life contexts, in order to make decisions and take actions that support our long term best interests, and in order to enjoy a wide array of healthy human experiences.
If shifting attention is hard for you, you might try this exercise below, and see if that provides a possible framework for visualising the shifts between tasks, and recognising all the different mental states your life currently requires of you.
Exercise: A Life’s Work
Jot down all the different types of activity required of you in this stage of your life.
This could include professional activities such as people management, teaching, mentoring, independent research, committee work, organising events, managing budgets, grant proposals.
It might also include charitable and voluntary activities and community commitments.
It could include caregiving for children, neighbours, relatives and pets.
It will most likely include all the regular and irregular chores and errands, financial planning and long- and short-term decision-making that come with daily adult life.
It may also include management of medical conditions, and care for your own health and wellbeing.
These activities will require a mixture of all sorts of mental activities, attention states, and forms of communication between your internal and external worlds:
assessing your own needs and states of mind
assessing others’ needs and states of mind
communicating and processing others’ communication
logistics and planning
identifying long- and short-term goals
contingency planning for the unforseeable
responding to urgent situations
deep focus on particular tasks
switching focus between tasks
decision-making
imagining into the future
reflecting on what’s worked or not in the past
assessing what’s going on in the present moment
Job Description
Look at the list you made above, and write a fictional job description for the season of life you’re currently in, outlining your roles, duties and responsibilities.
You might break these down into sections, e.g. Work, Caregiving, Relationships, Community, Health, Home Maintenance, Future Planning.
(This may feel really overwhelming - which might suggest you haven’t recognised just how much you are trying to do. If this is the case for you, think about areas of the job description that might need to be delegated, or that could be let go of for now. Take your time with this task, and don’t feel that there is a ‘right’ or ‘complete’ way to do it.)
Person Specification
Taking into consideration all the activities in the categories described in the job description, what are the personal qualities that serve you best in each?
You might think about which attributes work across multiple categories. For example, diplomacy might serve you well in family contexts as well as work ones.
You might also think about whether there are some areas of your job description that require some of your attributes and not others. For example, you probably don’t need your rigorous analytical skills while weeding your allotment, but you will need them in your role as treasurer for a hobby group.
Job Titles
What sort of job titles can you come up with to encompass what you are trying to do in your life at the moment?
For example, you might consider that you are acting as a Customer Service Representative in parts of your life - troubleshooting on behalf of people who need practical assistance.
You might find that you are a Project Manager for a relative’s care, or an Advocate for someone who needs help navigating systems and services, or a Play Worker while you mind your 5-year-old niece, or a Financial Planner as you do your taxes and household budgeting.
See if it helps you switch between tasks and roles to think in terms of what job function you are performing at any given time, what the person specification might be, and which of your strengths and attributes you can bring to the task to make it as satisfying as possible.
For example, it helps me to go with the flow of the interruptions and demands of domestic life when I consider that I’m in Concierge mode.
I can imagine myself in a crisp uniform, at a desk in a hotel lobby, cracking on with some paperwork, but open and friendly and ready to respond to requests that might come my way.
This helps me marshal the attitudes and skills that this role requires. I can remember that it doesn’t serve my mood, my relationships, my task satisfaction, or my efficacy to persist in Writer or Therapist mode when I’m behind the concierge desk. I’m using my time and attention differently.
Reflective questions:
Is it easy or difficult to imagine different job descriptions?
Looking over all that you are trying to do at this stage in your life, are you able to give yourself credit for how much work and energy you are putting into it?
Can you give yourself credit for the attitudes and attributes that serve you well in various activities of life?
What attitudes and attributes might you like to develop? (Patience is a big one for me, and an ongoing project!)
For an interesting podcast episode on attention, check out Amishi Jha on The One You Feed - her book, Peak Mind, is also an interesting read.
