Context switching & learning taxes kill productivity
I've been doing a lot of thinking and a bit of research into the idea of context switching and the impact it has on our productivity. Though some recent conversations, I got introduced idea of a learning tax.
In short, a learning tax is the idea that when you switch from working on achieving one objective or outcome to another, there is a cost that comes into play when initially getting ramped up on a new objective or outcome.
I did a quick ~4 minute write-up with a few graphs to better help compare the ideas and show just how much loss is involved if you combine both context switching & learning taxes.
Please share your thoughts, I'd love to hear.
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very impressive post Matt. Hat off to you! If I may borrow your "learning tax" concept, we realized that LT happens not just every day, but every time to switch contexts. In an office scenario, that happens every time to go from your inbox to Slack, from Slack to Jira, from Jira to a spreadsheet... we call it a tool-wagging-the-dog problem, where users end up chasing never-ending notifications and tasks. There's no easy solution to this LT... but to build human-first tools!