Speaker 1: Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning,
Speaker 1: This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
Speaker 1: tip is to free up time for meaningful work by
Speaker 1: reducing the time you spend switching between tasks. Today's tip
Speaker 1: comes from an article in the Harvard Business Review about
Speaker 1: what the authors call the toggling tax, that is the
Speaker 1: time and energy that goes to switching between applications. You
Speaker 1: probably know what I mean. You're in PowerPoint and realize
Speaker 1: you need to look up a statistic, so you go
Speaker 1: to the web. Your homepage is The New York Times,
Speaker 1: so you quickly scan the latest headlines before searching for
Speaker 1: the data you need. A few minutes later, you're back
Speaker 1: in PowerPoint working on your presentation. When you get a
Speaker 1: team's chat note offication, you switch over and quickly reply
Speaker 1: to the message. Then, while you are already interrupted, you
Speaker 1: figure you might as well pop into email to see
Speaker 1: if there is anything urgent. Finally, you make it back
Speaker 1: to PowerPoint. In just a few minutes, you have been
Speaker 1: in PowerPoint, the New York Times wherever you got the
Speaker 1: data you needed, PowerPoint again, then teams, then email, then
Speaker 1: back to PowerPoint, and you probably repeat this sort of
Speaker 1: sequence dozens of times per day. The authors of the
Speaker 1: articles say this context switching takes a toll for starters,
Speaker 1: it can increase stress, but beyond that, every switch takes
Speaker 1: some amount of time. The authors use software to measure
Speaker 1: how long it took for one hundred and thirty seven
Speaker 1: workers across twenty teams to do the next step after toggling,
Speaker 1: in other words, to get used to the initial application
Speaker 1: again and figure out where they were and what comes next.
Speaker 1: They found that it took just over two seconds per
Speaker 1: switch to reorient and re engage, and that people switched
Speaker 1: contexts almost twelve hundred times per day. That's a total
Speaker 1: of almost four hours and a week of toggling tax,
Speaker 1: or just shy of about a tenth of a standard
Speaker 1: work week. Now, of course, you probably lose more time
Speaker 1: than that in distractions, reading headlines, or deleting emails that
Speaker 1: you didn't need to receive in the first place, but
Speaker 1: the toggling tax alone can be substantial. If you are
Speaker 1: trying to get more done at work and spend less
Speaker 1: time at work so you've got time to do other things,
Speaker 1: it pays to try to reduce your toggling tax. So
Speaker 1: how do you do that. If you are managing people,
Speaker 1: it would be smart to see what you can do
Speaker 1: as a team to limit interruptions and set expectations. Maybe
Speaker 1: you agree not to send each other messages for a
Speaker 1: few hours during the day unless it is absolutely urgent.
Speaker 1: But even if you are just in charge of you,
Speaker 1: awareness helps notice when you switch contexts and consider whether
Speaker 1: the switch is truly necessary. In some cases, you may
Speaker 1: be able to postpone and batch some of your switches.
Speaker 1: For instance, if you are working on a report and
Speaker 1: need to incorporate content from another source, just put the
Speaker 1: content you need in brackets such as number of sites
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty four number of sites in twenty fourteen,
Speaker 1: and highlight it so you can see it, or you
Speaker 1: can use the publishing abbreviation t K for to come
Speaker 1: as a placeholder. Then when you go to the app
Speaker 1: that will provide the information you need, you can scan
Speaker 1: through the document, collect all the information you need at once,
Speaker 1: and enter it in the places where it belongs. I
Speaker 1: also recommend minimizing apps you don't need and turning off notifications.
Speaker 1: Out of sight is out of mind, So if you
Speaker 1: don't know you have email, Slack teams or text messages,
Speaker 1: you won't be tempted to switch over and process them.
Speaker 1: Even if your workplace does expect a quick response, you
Speaker 1: can probably be unplugged for at least a half hour
Speaker 1: between message checks. That might eliminate a dozen or more toggles.
Speaker 1: This time of year, no one needs a reminder that
Speaker 1: there are some taxes we have to pay, but the
Speaker 1: toggling tax is not one of them. Or if we
Speaker 1: do have to switch contexts, at least we have some
Speaker 1: control over our toggling tax rate. If you can reduce
Speaker 1: your toggling tax by half, you may be able to
Speaker 1: free up a couple of hours a week for your
Speaker 1: most important work or for doing something besides work. Either
Speaker 1: of those sounds like a welcome tax break to me.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, this is Laura, Thanks for listening, and
Speaker 1: here's to making the most of our our time. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas,
Speaker 1: or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura
Speaker 1: vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia.
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