My workday used to unfold like this — I would start with a clear plan focused on upcoming projects. While attempting to complete some programming or other tasks, I would begin checking my email, responding immediately to anything that seemed even remotely important. Chat notifications would pop up, and I’d rush to read them. Each time my phone lit up, I’d glance at the screen. Not to mention the times I found myself on YouTube or Instagram, wondering how I ended up there in the first place. After a few hours, my train of thought was completely disrupted, leaving me anxious for the rest of the day, feeling like I was wasting time and falling behind on my scheduled work.

If you can relate to this constant work/distractions tug-of-war, then you know that even 15-minute task can end up consuming hours, followed by another hour to correct mistakes and issues.

It’s a common belief that a lack of time prevents us from achieving our goals. Bill Gates once said that no matter how wealthy you are, you still only have 24 hours in a day. That, of course, implies that you have to spend your time wisely. But, I’ve found that such reminders only cause more anxiety, which in turn only glues me to YouTube even more strongly.

Though it seems logical, there’s a hidden trap in the belief that time is limited and precious. If the solution were simply to devote most of our time to important tasks, then a 15-second story on Instagram shouldn’t make any difference, right? After all, how long does it take to glance at a chat message or quickly scan some news headlines? Yet, how does it happen that after such a brief 15-second interruption, returning to the main task becomes noticeably more challenging?

Intuitively, we can derive that a lack of productivity isn’t due to a lack of time, but rather a lack of attention. In other words, you struggle to make full use of your available time because you’ve wasted your attention. For many years, I have held as a personal axiom that the most precious asset in life is attention.

If you Google ‘impact of short distractions on attention’ (or ask your favorite AI assistant to Google it for you) you will find plenty of studies that such distractions can have a disproportionately disruptive effect on your ability to maintain focus and produce high-quality work. Some examples here, here and here.

But let’s look deeper. As Nir Eayl, the author of ‘Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life’ points out, before you call something a ‘distration’ you first need to determine what it is distracting you from. Chances are, deep down inside you might view enjoyable activities, such as chatting with friends or hanging out on Instagram, as your preferred activity while your boring work annoyingly distracts your from it.

That’s why I prefer the term ‘context switch’ over ‘distraction’. Interestingly enough, both computer science and cognitive psychology use this term to describe virtually the same phenomenon.

In computing, a context switch is the process where a CPU switches from executing one process to another. This involves saving the state of the current process (like its memory and CPU registers) so it can resume operation later, and loading the state of the new process to start or continue its execution.

In psychological terms, a context switch happens when an individual stops working on one mental task and starts working on another. This can occur when a person is interrupted or when they voluntarily decide to shift their focus. This switch requires person’s brain to reorient its resources towards the new task, often leading to a period of reduced productivity.

In both the CPU and your brain, that leads to switching costs. But if in the case of the CPU it is just latencies and higher core temperatures, in your case it is missed road turns and forgotten loved ones’ birthdays. Ask me how I know.

But unless you’re lying in a coma, your life is filled with context switches. In fact, the more active life you’re trying to live, the more switching you experience on a daily basis. And if you, like myself, are basically made of coffee that makes the situation simply disastrous.

After trying dozens of profound techniques aimed at minimizing unnecessary switching and keeping my attention under control — such as getting enough sleep, maintaining a to-do list, eating nutritious meals, or, god forbid, ‘coffee in small doses’ — I’ve grown to believe that forcing myself to behave differently most of the time has the directly opposite effect. So instead of trying to force myself to focus, I needed a trick to keep myself focused.

My best approach so far I borrowed from Timothy Gallwey’s book The Inner Game of Work. The technique can be best described by one of the examples from the book. The problem the author helped to solve was that patients were spending too much time in the waiting room before seeing a dentist at a clinic. Needless to say, managers tried all known ‘time management’ and schedule optimizing techniques. As a solution, Gallwey suggested that every day all staff members observe or make informed guesses on how many patients had been kept waiting for more than 20 minutes. Every morning, they posted everyone’s observations and guesses along with the correct number provided by their receptionist. The idea was to add awareness to the situation rather than implementing another clever solution. Surprisingly, at the end of the first day, the number of waiting patients dropped from 15 to 10. By the end of the fifth day, there were none. But what is really intriguing was that when asked what the staff was doing differently, no one could say why. ‘It just worked’ was the common answer, ‘but I don’t know why’.

So here’s how I adapted this awareness-based approach to my context switch problem. When I’m working on something and get distracted — whether by an important email from a client, a message from a friend, a sudden urge to re-watch that YouTube video where a pilot of a tiny plane ends up dangling from a tree after a wild encounter with stormy weather — I just put a ‘+’ sign in my distractions list for the day. I don’t force myself to refocus on work, nor do I lecture myself on the necessity of staying focused; I just add a ‘+’ sign every time it happens.

And, as in the example above, it introduced a crucial component to my daily routines — awareness. I simply allowed myself to be aware of every focus switch I experienced, acknowledging each one before adding a ‘+’ to my list. That awareness routine did the trick I was looking for. By the end of the first day, I had only switched focus to an Instagram story once during my designated work time. In the following days, I had zero (!) context switches to ‘junk information’ such as short videos or Facebook posts, achieving all this without any conscious effort. It’s like getting in shape for summer without having to give up your favorite pizza.

Going forward, by simply acknowledging every distraction, I managed to sort them into necessary (writing down an interesting idea for an article or an angry email from a client) and toxic (a stupid story on Instagram from a person I’ve never met).

I also discovered an interesting feature — sometimes my urge to quickly check the news feed was in reality just a need for a short pause, especially if I was working on a complex task. So instead of switching to watching some cat videos, I now simply take a 30-second walk around my room while staying in the context of the task.

Over the course of two months, I stopped listening to music while working, deleted the Instagram app, and exchanged YouTube for MasterClass on every occasion I wanted to consciously switch from work. More importantly, I often found myself completing all the work even before my planned end of day. I became more interested in listening than talking. I even found enough time to start and develop this blog.

So, if you too often find yourself at 3 pm still in underpants watching stories about cats getting startled by cucumbers, I suggest you try this technique and then tell me how it goes. After all there’s no better way to learn how something works than by trying to reproduce it.