If you want to live a life of meaning and purpose, you must become a master at organizing your time. Time blocking is one of the most effective strategies to do more of what matters to you.
Time blocking can help you be realistic about your time, fit everything that matters most into your week, keep things from falling through the cracks, and keep you focused on your outcomes even when you get interrupted.
It’s an especially helpful strategy for people with ADHD, as it can help us think through all the elements that we need to work effectively.
Within the strategy of time blocking, one of the most overlooked sub-strategies is context switching. This is an especially useful strategy for people with ADHD, as it can help with some of our particular challenges.
Although sometimes it’s helpful to leverage a space from one activity to do another task, switching locations — or at least resetting your environment — between time blocks can help you clear your mind and switch tasks more easily.
5 Reasons to Include Context-Switching When Time Blocking Your Schedule
Here are 5 reasons why you should consider context-switching when you time block your schedule.
(1) Avoid “Place Burnout”
When it comes to getting things done, allocating time is only one piece of the puzzle. The right physical location and set-up can be a make-or-break factor when it comes to getting things done effectively — or at all. This is especially the case for people with ADHD and others who are highly-attuned to small variances in their surrounding environment.
Finding the right place is it’s own challenge. Sometimes learning what place will work takes time and experimentation.
Once you find a place that works, you can run the risk of “place burnout.”
“Place Burnout” occurs when an environment that works for a certain task becomes ineffective or “stale” after a certain amount of time there. For example, maybe you find your local library to be a good place for some quiet deep work, but after a few hours you might notice that the energy of the space is no longer working for you.
If you try to “power through” in a place that has lost its energy, you set yourself up for that environment to no longer work at all.
This is where context-switching helps: by planning one discrete task for a location, you can leave before you burn out on that environment.
(2) Hone Focus and Attention
Every ADHDer knows that the crunch of limited time to get something done can be a huge focusing agent — it’s one of the reasons why procrastination is such a popular strategy.
Even when you have planned your time blocks to align the task with the right location and your best energy, it’s easy to start spinning in overwhelm when you actually sit down to start work. This can lead to avoidance or delay, even if it’s through other projects.
By designating specific work for a specific physical location and giving yourself a time constraint, you can force that “crunch time” mindset without actually suffering the negative consequences of procrastination.
For example, let’s say you plan to go to the library to write and send your newsletter. Knowing you have limited time to get this one task done at the library can help you stay focused on the task for the time you’re there. When you finish the task, you leave and switch to a new location for your next task.
(3) Avoid the Pitfalls of Hyperfocus
If you’ve ever sat down to do some work with the sun pouring into your window, only to look up and find yourself in complete darkness, you’ve experienced hyperfocus.
Hyperfocus is a state of intense concentration to the point where you become fixated on a task and lose track of time and space.
That first part — “intense concentration” — might seem like a good thing when focus and attention can be hard to come by. And sometimes a brief period of hyperfocus can help us power through a task and make big progress.
Although it can lead to increased productivity and creativity, hyperfocus can also cause problems like procrastination, missed deadlines, and burnout.
Just like working out too hard can cause damage in your body, too much intense concentration can deplete our cognitive resources, impacting our ability to recover and reset for new tasks, and leading to burnout.
The ultimate outcome isn’t to go as hard as we can in one session, but to maintain sustainable efforts over long term.
Context switching can keep us out of hyperfocus mode, enhancing our endurance over the long arc of time.
(4) Eliminate Over-scheduling
I know you might be thinking: context switching is going to take up time that I could otherwise spend getting things done. This is true — but it’s a feature of the strategy, not a flaw.
First, remember that context switching doesn’t always require travel.
Even where you do switch location, however, the time it takes to switch location will prevent you from over-scheduling yourself. Context switching builds in natural transitions and breaks between time blocks.
It also builds variety into your day, giving you the dopamine hit that your ADHD brain is craving.
(5) Reduce Cognitive Overload
People with ADHD tend to excel at creative tasks. Creative tasks can stimulate our minds and provide variety, but they also involve lots of micro decisions that can be cognitively draining.
You may not realize it while you’re doing it, but something like writing a blog post (or even an email), or designing a graphic involves many small decisions. The effect of this is to deplete our cognitive bandwidth and reduce our “decision tokens.”
Switching locations between cognitive tasks is a natural way to insert a break between high-bandwidth activities and give your brain a chance to reset.
Where Can You Incorporate Context Switching?
As you time block your week, where can you incorporate context switching?
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