Context switching used to be a productivity no-go. But things have changed with AI.
When the research around context switching was first popularized, it made sense. Every time you bounce between tasks, your brain pays a tax. You lose focus and the quality of work drops.
But there's a very important nuance to that, and it matters now more than ever because AI is making context switching the norm.
When AI can build in the background, you shouldn't be sitting and watching it work. You should kick off a task and move to another one.
So the question now isn't whether to context switch.
The question is how you're context switching and whether you're switching between things that actually matter, or if you're just getting better at being distracted.
So here's what science says...
Your brain needs the right anchor points.
Anchor points are like browser tabs you can pull back up without reloading the page.
When an anchor point is strong (you know what you're working on, why it matters, and where you left off), your brain can drop the thread and pick it back up without much friction.
According to the Cognitive Anchor System framework, your mind is constantly choosing what to organize itself around, pulling certain threads into focus while letting others sit waiting their turn.
When you switch to a new task you haven't loaded into working memory yet, your brain has to start from scratch. That's where the tax shows up, because you're paying the setup cost each time.
When you switch between a few important threads you've already been working on and have loaded into working memory, the cost drops dramatically.
Researchers call this "attention residue." And it can work for you or against you.
When you switch away from important work, your brain keeps chewing on it in the background. That's how you can be in the shower and suddenly you see the answer to a problem you stopped working on three hours ago. That's residue working for you, because the threads were meaningful enough that your brain kept them loaded and kept connecting them to everything else you encountered during the day.
Noise doesn't do that. When you switch away from a Teams thread about something only slightly connected to your actual work, your brain still holds onto it, but there's nothing to connect it to. It just sits there taking up space, making the next real thought harder to load.
Now, I'm not saying you can run important things like family and work in parallel and stay sharp at both (answering emails at your kid's ballgame is still a losing trade).
Your work bandwidth and your relational bandwidth aren't the same tank.
When you try to pull from one while you're supposed to be pouring into the other, you end up shorting both because your brain can't load a spreadsheet and your daughter's needs at the same time.
What I'm talking about here is different. I'm talking about how you handle the work in front of you when you actually have the bandwidth to spend on it.
And this is exactly why order and prioritization are so important now.
If you don't know what's most important (in order), AI will just help you produce more of what doesn't matter.
I think the next skill our generation has to learn is how to context switch around the right anchors.
Which means we have to get crystal clear on what's most important to us and how we want to affect change.
Because order it what makes context switching healthy.
Without it, you're just wandering in circles more efficiently.