# Context switching (at work)

> Moving attention from one piece of work to another, then rebuilding the mental context needed for each task.

## What it means

Say in the first line that this means people moving between tasks at work, not a processor switching between processes (the computing meaning dominates related searches and is where the term was borrowed from). Terms: task switching (lab psychology), context switching, multitasking. The numbers worth knowing, explained correctly, from Mark, Gonzalez & Harris, CHI 2005 (verified, https://www.interruptions.net/literature/Mark-CHI05-p321-mark.pdf): “people spend about 11 minutes in a working sphere before switching”; “57% of their working spheres are interrupted”; work resumed the same day took “an average length of time of 25 min. 26 sec” after “an average of 2.26 (sd=2.79) working spheres” — elapsed time spent on other work, not time lost; “77.2% of interrupted work was resumed on the same day”. Mark, Gudith & Klocke, CHI 2008 (verified): interrupted people “completed interrupted tasks in less time with no difference in quality” but reported higher stress after 20 minutes. Note neutrally that the widely repeated ‘23 minutes’ is not in the 2008 paper it is usually linked to.

## A practical example

You leave a proposal to answer chat, open a spreadsheet from the message, then return and must reconstruct which paragraph and source you were using.

## Put it into practice

- Name the concrete situation before applying the label. Context switching (at work) is useful only when it changes a choice, boundary or next action.
- Make the state visible: write the owner, time, source or stopping condition down instead of relying on memory.
- Review what happened. Keep the part that reduced ambiguity and change the part that added ceremony without helping the work.

## How it relates to Plexii

one desk per piece of work, Where was I (/help/home-widget-where-was-i), Resume handoff notes (/help/desk-resume). Link /blog/context-switching for habits (it uses a different study, so no overlap).

## Sources

- [Mark, Gonzalez and Harris, CHI 2005](https://www.interruptions.net/literature/Mark-CHI05-p321-mark.pdf)
- [Mark, Gudith and Klocke, CHI 2008](https://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/chi08-mark.pdf)