Why "never multitask" is bad advice for software engineers
Stop feeling exhausted by context switching. Learn how software engineers use "save states" and batching to manage multitasking and double their productivity.
Common productivity advice suggests that you should never multitask. This is a nice idea in theory: You hide in your cave, work on a feature, and come back when finished. It fails completely in practice for modern software engineers:
You are on an on-call rotation.
You must review pull requests from your peers.
You attend meetings that fragment your day.
You write code that takes time to build and deploy.
The expectation of pure single-tasking is a fantasy. It ignores the reality of the job.
The real enemy is not the act of doing multiple things. It is uncontrolled context swapping. Your brain spends more “CPU cycles” loading and unloading context than it does processing the actual logic. You end up exhausted at the end of the day with very little finished work to show for it
Has this happened to you?
Many people think productivity is a discipline problem. It’s not. It is a systems design problem. You don’t need more willpower. You need a better system to manage tasks. You can apply concepts …