I Was Context Switching While Writing This Post — Here’s What It Cost Me

This one is happening in real time.

Right now, reviewing this week’s content in one chat. A second chat open in a completely different tab, for a digital product I’m learning to market — on a platform I’ve never used before, so every step needs actual attention. And three WhatsApp conversations running underneath both, each with someone expecting a reply at some point today.

None of it is dramatic. No fires. No one’s upset. It’s just an ordinary working day. And it’s taking noticeably longer than it should.

Here’s what that actually looks like in practice. A WhatsApp message comes in. I start replying. Halfway through the reply I remember what I was in the middle of in the content chat, so I go back to that half-finished. Then I need to check something on the new platform, so I switch again. By the time I come back to finish the WhatsApp reply, I’ve half-forgotten what I was going to say, so I reread the message to reload it.

None of those individual moments cost much. A few seconds here, half a minute there. But they never stop. Every switch means picking the thread back up from wherever I dropped it, and that reloading is where the time actually goes — not in the work itself, but in relocating my own attention to where I left off.

What makes this different from simply being busy is that none of these four things are hard on their own. Reviewing content, learning a new platform, replying to WhatsApp — I could do any one of them without much effort. It’s the switching between them, dozens of times in a single sitting, that turns an easy afternoon into a slow one.

I don’t think the fix here is doing less. Some days genuinely do have four things going on. What I’m noticing, writing this, is how much smoother it goes when I let myself finish a thought before I switch — reply to all three WhatsApp messages in one go instead of one at a time between other things, or close the new-platform tab until I’ve got a proper block for it rather than half-open the whole day.

It’s a small thing. But the difference between “I did four things today” and “I did four things today and felt scattered doing all of them” seems to come down almost entirely to how many times I let myself get pulled mid-thought.

Your turn: what’s open in the background right now while you’re doing something else — and how many times have you actually switched to it in the last hour?