🧾 Context Switch Tax 101

In partnership with

Hey there! Welcome back to The Flow by Flocus. If you’re new around here, welcome! 👋  You can catch up on our previous editions right here.

This week: We’re revisiting an oldie, but a goodie: the cost of context-switching. How switching between dozens of texts, tasks, and “things” every day saps your energy and focus — and what you can do about it. Scroll on for the scoop!

🧾 What’s Context Switch Tax?

Life keeps us switching between dozens (if not hundreds) of tasks, tabs, and responsibilities every day.

For every switch, our brains pay some kind of “tax”: lost focus, emotional imbalance, reduced mental energy.

Research shows it can take up to 20 minutes to fully refocus after each switch.

That adds up to major mental fatigue over the course of a day.

So if you’re constantly feeling pulled in different directions or unable to focus on 1 thing for an extended period, it’s not a failure on your part; it’s actually “cognitive residue” left over from this exhausting process.

Your brain might be powerful, but it needs a little time to transition between things. If you’re still mentally in the last task while trying to start the next one, you’ll spend more energy, while also getting less done, typically.

What are some real-life examples of context-switching? And how can you tackle it to preserve your energy and focus? Let’s take a look.

💥 How Context Switching Shows Up

• 📱 Digital clutter: Jumping between Slack messages, Notion pages, docs, tabs, texts, etc.

• 🧩 Task hopping: Writing a report → remembering an email → checking your phone and getting distracted by notifications for 20 minutes

• 💬 Constant communication: Feeling productive because you’re replying to messages quickly, but you’re not entering deep focus or working on the “meat” of your projects

• 💭 Mental fragmentation: Carrying leftover thoughts or emotional residue from one context into the next (for example, fretting about a home errand while in class)

These are just a few examples of tiny switches that cost your brain a “tax” and put you at risk of losing major time and energy.

So what can you do to protect your focus and keep switching to a minimum? Read on for our top 5 tips.

Real quick: Keep up with the world in minutes with Morning Brew!

Perfect for both students, professionals, or anyone — it’s a smart, concise daily newsletter delivering bite-sized news.

It’s free, informative, and checking them out supports our tiny team, allowing us to continue delivering value to your inbox 💜

Here’s a quick message from them 👇️

Your career will thank you.

Over 4 million professionals start their day with Morning Brew—because business news doesn’t have to be boring.

Each daily email breaks down the biggest stories in business, tech, and finance with clarity, wit, and relevance—so you're not just informed, you're actually interested.

Whether you’re leading meetings or just trying to keep up, Morning Brew helps you talk the talk without digging through social media or jargon-packed articles. And odds are, it’s already sitting in your coworker’s inbox—so you’ll have plenty to chat about.

It’s 100% free and takes less than 15 seconds to sign up, so try it today and see how Morning Brew is transforming business media for the better.

Check it out

Now, here’s how to reduce your context switch tax!

🙇 How to Reduce Your Context Switch Tax

Reducing friction between mental modes preserves energy, focus, and creativity. Here’s how to do it.

🗂️ Batch tasks by type or energy level

Work on similar tasks during the same time block. For example, if you have a lot of graphics to design for your social media page, sit down for an hour and work on as many as you can.

Pay attention to your energy levels, too, and group tasks in whatever way makes sense. You might prefer to work on high-energy projects in one batch, or sandwich a big task between two smaller ones.

🔕 Protect deep work windows

Since our devices are a notorious cause of context switches, it’s a good idea to mute notifications for at least one time block daily. (Easier said than done, we know!)

Of course, phone pings aren’t the only distractions out there, so do whatever helps you prevent them — shut your bedroom door, put in your headphones, or work at the library for the afternoon.

🚪 Create “transition rituals”

We’ve talked about startup and shutdown rituals before. These routines help your brain switch “on” and “off” at the start and end of your work sesh.

But you can also use these mini rituals to transition between any kind of task. Stretch, close your browser tabs, take a short walk — whatever helps you ease into the next thing.

Regular breaks (at least 1 every 2 hours) can also help reduce context-switching and maintain your focus reserves.

📅 Design themed days

Where your schedule allows, dedicate days of the week to certain categories or tasks:

• Mondays: Meetings

• Tuesdays: Studying

• Saturdays: Vacuuming

Setting reminders and breaking up your themed days into smaller chunks (mornings, afternoons, nights) can help you create a consistent routine that takes less mental energy to follow.

Communicate your schedules and themed days with others. Not only will this give you practice with setting boundaries, but it also prevents conflict by letting your roommates know not to disturb your Tuesday study sessions, for example.

📋 Use a task “parking lot”

When new thoughts pop up, jot them down and return back to your task instead of context-switching immediately to the new thing.

This will take a lot of practice — especially if you tend to stash things in multiple places, or you forget to go back and check your “parking lot” later. Experiment with different “capture” methods to find what works best for you.

🪅 Flocus Picks

A curated list of things worth sharing.

• Task Batching 101 (The Flow Archives) — New to task batching? Need a refresher, or some tips on how to do it? Check out our dedicated newsletter on task-batching!

• What Multi-tasking Does to Your Brain (Video) — This short clip from BBC Ideas dives deeper into the science behind multi-tasking and context-switching

• focus soundscapes (Playlist) — Some gentle background beats to power your next deep work sesh

✨ Flocus: Your Personal Productivity Dashboard

Your focus deserves a home that doesn’t drain it.

Flocus gives you one calm, centralized space to plan your day, manage tasks, and protect your attention to spend less time switching tabs and more time actually getting things done.

Go to Flocus

You can’t remove every switch, but you can control the cost. The less you switch, the better your focus can flow.

What’d you think of this one? We wrote about context switching way back in November 2023, but thought it was a good one to revisit. Hit reply and share your thoughts!

Until next Sunday,

Flocus Team