Stream interruptions

“I just can’t get through my task list with so many interruptions”

If you’re working remotely, and spend most of your time at your laptop, in between meetings or in transit, you’ve most likely had this hurdle. It is tough to get to the bottom of you mail inbox, todo list, task list, you name it.

Here’s one tip that will help you: stream interruptions1

Context switching is a very expensive action2. Lack of focus compounds, so switching between multiple different tasks, especially when they vary in complexity has a very negative impact on your attention span.

Interruptions can be internal (a new idea pops into your mind) or external, a notification 1 comes through that requires your attention. Both can be harmful. Meditation mentors teach you how to let thoughts through your mind without dwelling on them. In the very same way, you should stream your interruptions to a bucket where you can pay attention to them in due time.

I use Todoist for task management, and Raycast to go fast3. Using them in combination, I use

  1. the keyword at to trigger the todoist Quick Add Task
  2. the @ symbol to tag it as work in progress (wip)
  3. And add some context about it Every time I get an interruption, I only allow myself to spend 60’ adding this task to the pile of ongoing items. And only when I am done with my current item, can I pick from that list to continue my work.

At the end of my day, I can review and reevaluate how urgent or important any of the tasks are and put them in their appropriate bucket.

Footnotes

Footnotes

  1. I encourage you to use this in combination with Untitled ↩ ↩2

  2. “The direct cost of a context switch—measured as the time spent by the kernel saving and restoring CPU registers and other architectural state—typically ranges from 1,000 to 2,000 CPU cycles on modern hardware. This includes the overhead of switching the program counter, stack pointer, and general-purpose registers. The indirect costs are far more significant and often dominate performance impact. One context switch costs as much as executing hundreds or thousands of simple instructions. Learn more ↩

  3. Faster is better almost always. Ramón Campayo, world champion in speed memory wrote a book on fast reading. In that book he explains the main reason why people are slow reading: they’re have a slow imagination. He presents the following thought experiment: when you’re watching a film, you are effectively processing 10 times the information as compared to reading a book, and yet, you are able to remember a scene. The problem with reading is you take too much time to picture that in your head, so you get lost. The point he tries to make is speed will make you a better reader. You can try this out in web apps online. For the very same reason you should use shortcuts. ↩