We’ve probably all listed our ability to multitask as a strength in a job interview at some point in our career journeys. And while it seems like a valuable skill at face value, research shows it’s wholly unproductive.

One study from Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction lab found that when you try to do two tasks at once, your performance on both tasks gets worse – about 20 percent worse, to be exact.

Why? Because multitasking requires your brain to context switch. Context switching is the act of halting work on one project, performing a different, unrelated task, and then resuming work on the original project.  

The unrelated task could entail working on a different project, checking your email, tracking down a file, or scrolling Instagram for a minute (or twenty). No matter what the interruption is, it reduces your ability to focus and apply your full mental capacity to the original project.

The effects of context switching on productivity

The concept of context switching originates from computer science: a task context is the minimal set of data used by a task that must be saved to allow a task to be interrupted, and later continued from the same point. In terms of computing, the smaller the context, the shorter the latency.

But when applied to human behavior, the amount of data you intake when you context switch has no bearing on how long it will take you to refocus on your original task after being interrupted.

All interruptions are equally detrimental to focus. However, the cognitive strain of your original project can affect how long it takes you to get back into the swing of things after pausing to check your phone or find a key document.

If, for example, you’re inputting data into a CRM, it may take only a few minutes to reorient and make progress on this original task after checking your email. But if you’re writing code, developing a product strategy roadmap, or writing a blog post, it’ll take a lot longer to re-enter the state of deep focus required to complete these more cognitively-demanding projects.

According to one study, it takes an average of 23 minutes to refocus after switching between tasks. So if you context-switch once or twice a day, you lose less than an hour of truly productive work.

This is likely a greater loss of productivity than most people expect, but it wouldn’t entirely derail your ability to get high-quality work done on cognitively-intense tasks.

Unfortunately, the majority of people context switch a lot more than once or twice a day.

One grim statistic found most office workers spend an average of 3 minutes on any given task before switching to something else.

That means their ability to do deep work is basically shot. The result? The quality of their work across tasks goes down.

This contributes to feelings of stress and a workday overcast with the gloomy sense that you’re not doing enough.

If we’re all feeling it, why can’t we all agree to stop tolerating workday interruptions?

One of the primary reasons interruptions are now a commonplace and accepted part of our working life is because of the myriad collaborative tools we use everyday, and the constant influx of notifications these tools emit while we try to focus on more important tasks.

How siloed apps make context-switching worse

The rate at which we context switch now is arguably higher than ever before, due in large part to the fact that we are each beholden to at least four or five tools – all of which deliver notifications, updates, and reminders to our desktops and phones throughout the day.

We’re constantly checking and rechecking communication tools like Slack, Gmail, or Outlook, along with collaborative project management tools like Trello, Figma, Jira, Miro, Confluence, and an infinite number of others.

Each time we get a notification from Slack or Gmail, it’s nearly impossible to resist the urge to immediately stop what we’re doing and make sure we’re not missing anything important.

This fear of missing something important, while ever-present, is rarely justified. Many times, when we check a Slack message, it’s a low-priority question or suggestion. And most emails are promos from the various tools in our tech stack, daily newsletters, or general marketing emails.

That’s to say nothing of the gratuitous amount of time we spend tracking down documents, files, links, and other information we need to do our various tasks.

A 2012 McKinsey report found that the average worker spent about 1.8 hours every day, or 9.3 hours per week, searching for and gathering information.

This is a time sink that hours of our week simply disappear into, yielding no tangible progress on our tasks.

And it’s difficult to rationalize wasting time like this in a world frothing over with productivity tools and data repositories.

It serves as a signal that the tools we assumed would make us more productive have failed to do so by fragmenting our central knowledge base into dozens of tiny pieces. We’ve all spent way too much time searching for a link in Slack that, it turns out, was actually linked to a single card in Trello or sent via email.

Together, frequent context switching combined with the hours wasted tracking down the information we need to complete our various tasks are a recipe for lackluster work performance and unnecessary stress.

Even if we’re getting everything done that we need to in a day, the fact is, we could feel a lot better about our output, a lot less frantic, and a lot more efficient.

Unified context: the antidote to fragmented attention

Clearly, context switching is a problem. So, how can we reduce context switching and the amount of time we waste tracking down information to start or resume various projects throughout the day?

There are several strategies you can implement to improve focus and reduce context-switching, but these require significant behavior change and some good old-fashioned will power.

While some people may be able to commit themselves to completely changing the way they organize and approach their work lives, people aren’t always great at keeping up with highly regimented adjustments to their existing way of life. Just ask Planet Fitness.

An easier way to reduce context switching and cut down significantly on time spent searching for files and information is to leverage a tool that provides unified context across applications for all the tasks that demand your attention each day.

What exactly is unified context? Unified context is a single view of all relevant files, information, or messages that provide insight into a specific project, team, or meeting.

The context in this case is the supporting information and files that provide insights necessary to perform a specific task. Having the ability to access this information in one place unifies this context, eliminating the need to waste time searching for and gathering information across disparate sources or apps.

Classify enables teams to benefit from unified context by collecting all of the files, messages, links, and documents across their various SaaS apps and organizing them by project, team, and meeting.

This ensures you have the information you need to quickly get caught up on project updates, refresh your team on key insights before a meeting, or follow a task through to its completion without sifting through ten different apps gathering the resources and data you need to get things done.

The less time you spend switching between apps to get the information you need, the more time and attention you can devote to the work that really matters.

Restructuring your digital workspace based on your projects, teams, and meetings rather than your apps, channels, or databases ensures information lives where it’s most relevant, rather than where it was initially inputted.

Doing away with siloes by contextualizing information across your SaaS apps makes your teams faster, more efficient, and less stressed by eliminating that 1.8 hour time sink wasted searching for information every day.

It also reduces the amount of time it takes to refocus or reorient yourself for a new task by presenting all the files, links, and information you need to stay prepared and informed for each of your projects and meetings.

Want to see the power of unified context in action? Try Classify.