Switching Cost: What Are You Paying?

Picture this. You have a question about something. You're trying to accomplish a task. And you think to yourself, I really need to look up some information about how to do this. You think what better place to go than YouTube?
So you open your browser, you type YouTube, you go to the front page of YouTube and at the very top of the page you see a trailer for an upcoming movie that piques your interest. It has an actress in it that you recognize from another movie you really like and you think to yourself, Now, this might be a cool movie.
You look it up and you see that the movie is getting pretty good ratings, and you think to yourself, Maybe I'll go see that movie this weekend. Maybe you take a second to watch the trailer. Maybe you even send it to a friend. Check this out. Have you seen this? And after all this has happened, in a couple of minutes of gone by, you find yourself staring at your browser and thinking, What was I going to do?
Oh, that's right. I was going to look up this one thing that I need to know how to do. And it isn't just the fault of YouTube. I've been on my way from my bedroom to my living room to do a task and got sidetracked by something strange that my cat was doing. I stopped to see what it was doing.
I had my cat and then tried to remember what it was I was on my way to do in the first place. Well, there was a lot of research done on this, actually, even before we had smartphones. And back in the nineties, there were some researchers named Mya Evans and Rubinstein that did some really influential work on this topic.
They looked at what they called goals shifting and rule activation, and they identified these two processes that our brains engage in whenever we're moving from one task to the next. We have this mode of shifting goals. I want to do this now instead of the thing that I might have previously been doing. And then the rule activation part of it is that in order to do a thing, we kind of have to get in a certain headspace.
So our brain kind of turns on and off certain switches about the rules for how we should act in certain circumstances, depending on what we're trying to accomplish. So you have goals shifting and you have rule activation happening in your head. Our brains are very good at changing between things. However, there is what's called a switching cost. Every time you switch from one task to the next, there's a cost and that momentary lapse of remembering what you were on your way to do or why you were in this space.
That's an indication of that switching cost that your brain having to change gears, so to speak. And while we have to do this because obviously we have a lot of different things that we need to do throughout our day. Some of the side effects is that it uses time. Obviously, it uses mental energy, which I think is sometimes something we undervalue, is that not only is it taking seconds, but the mental energy, it's draining out of you to change back and forth between different focuses is also a limited resource.
So eventually that lack of mental energy that you've used up while switching leads to you feeling really fatigued. It also breaks what I would call our flow of concentration, so that when you are engaged in a task and then you have to stop and you have to refocus on something else and then come back, your flow is broken and you have to reestablish that which is going to take some time.
And studies also show that the act of switching actually prevents us from retaining a certain amount of information so that when you're moving from one task to the next, during that period of having to switch, you're going to lose some of that information that you might have otherwise retained if you hadn't had to switch your concentration. This is true everywhere, which means that in your personal life you also endure switching costs.
That means that if you're hanging out with friends or if you're on a date with somebody you're really interested in, and you have to switch your concentration from that person, and maybe the conversation that you're having to some incoming message on your phone or even to the question that the server is asking you about what food you want to order.
This is costing you. This is preventing you from retaining some of the information that they might have been giving you when you were talking. And in addition to things like relationships, it also affects things you enjoy doing. So you have switching costs even for relaxing. Suppose you want to sit down on your couch and just chill for a little while and then as you're chilling, you get a knock on the door or perhaps you get a notification on your phone.
So these switching costs are costs that we incur in every area of our life. It's something that our brains are good and efficient at doing, but we want to do it correctly. I mentioned earlier about the idea of goal shifting and rule activation. And I want to encourage you that it's important when we are goal shifting and we are activating this new set of rules in our brain to do so intentionally, as often as possible.
And I'm going to give you a few what I feel like are really helpful and simple ways to reduce the amount of switching costs you're going to endure in any given day. The first thing is, I'm going to encourage you to establish a start and stop time for tasks and activities that you consider important. So in other words, if you are going on a date, that date probably has a start and a start time.
And when you establish that start and stop time, you can focus on shifting your goal at the beginning of that timeslot toward that activity and then maintaining that goal and that focus on that activity for the duration of that time and then at the end intentionally switching it to do something else. If you're just sitting at a desk trying to do a task, maybe setting yourself a timer is a good way to start this practice.
Schedule a time on your calendar and then in that period of time, don't put on music or anything that you're watching outside of that. That could pull your attention away from the task. Really give your task your all. And then when that task ends, let yourself switch to something else. Which leads me to my second recommendation, which is engage in what I'm going to call true immersion, truly immersing ourself in a task or in an activity is really rewarding.
You're going to get so much more out of your conversations with your friends if you allow yourself to really immerse yourself in that conversation, ignoring everything else and really allowing yourself to deep dove into whatever it is that you happen to be doing at the time. And then don't feel bad when that task is over of coming out the other side and allowing some of that distraction back in.
So other than establishing a start and stop time for the thing you're going to engage in and using true immersion and ignoring outside stimuli, another critical step you're going to have to take is to control interruptions. That being said, I think it's really important that you start where you're at. So maybe you're someone who it's very difficult for you to cultivate immersion in tasks.
Maybe you struggle with attention. Maybe that's just not part of your common habit. I would say don't set your goals too high here. Start small and just set yourself smaller blocks of time. Say I'm going to really immerse myself for five, ten, 15 minutes at a time in this task. I wouldn't advise you to set like 2 hours as a block of time that you're going to deep dove.
The goal here is to limit the cost you were paying every day for switching. You probably don't have to switch as often as you have been doing and your tasks are probably suffering as a result. So how can we lower what we're paying for the cost of switching? Because at the end of the day, if the thing you're trying to do here really doesn't matter and doesn't deserve your attention, why are you doing i...