 So introducing Kaye Adam White. Kaye Adam is a principal engineer at HumanMade, a globally distributed enterprise WordPress agency where he consults for clients around the world. He helps organize the merge of the WordPress REST API and served as a maintainer of the API components until 2020 and remains a WordPress commit. Kaye Adam is based just across the river of New York City where he stoically ignores all of his friends who keep telling him to move to Jerusalem. All of this is true. Before I get started I'd love to know a little bit about who we are in the room. As Rachel said my name's Kaye Adam, you can call me Katam. Who in the room is working for an agency of any size? Okay, not that many. How many people just are running their own site for blog or passion or side project? What about like a site for your business? How many people work with somebody else? All right. How many people wish they do? How many people really want to go back to working alone? We can end it there for now. This talks about context switching and we're going to get into exactly what that means in this for our purposes. That's going to mean something a little specific but in general it's one of those things where it's a phrase where we each kind of have our own sense of what that might mean by trying to piece apart the words. It's also something that I've talked about with my manager a lot and if you talk with your manager about something a lot the chances are very good that either you your manager or another colleague have said that it's something you need to get better at. Context switching is definitely something that's come up in this context for me but because of that if it's something that I can get better at that means it's a skill right? If it's a skill it can be learned and if it's a skill it can be taught. I've been working on improving my ability to jump between projects for some time because at Human Made we work sometimes quite deeply on one project but more often in particularly in my role as a principal engineer I'm flitting across them. I'm talking to a number of different teams on a number of different client accounts and they all kind of have their own rules that we need to adapt to and there's been things that we've been able to see about what works and what doesn't and how we can prepare ourselves to deal with being stretched thin in that way. That's what this talk is hopefully going to get into. What this talk is not about is multitasking because if you go to Wikipedia and you try to look for context switching first you get a computer science concept then if you find the human version of human context switching I think it's the second sentence which says that attempting to multitask wastes time and increases our chance of making mistakes and about three sentences after that they quote a psychologist named Edward Hallowell who said that multitasking is a mythical activity in which people believe that they can perform two actions at the same time as well as one but they cannot. What we're actually doing when we think we're multitasking is we are switching our brain back and forth at a high frequency between two different actions and we're oscillating between each one our brains deciding every moment which one it needs to focus on and then it's doing a little bit of work. We're not going to get too like mechanistic and computerly with the metaphors here but you can think of it as like switching between threads or various other technical concepts if that's helpful. Studies show that this switching has an impact it impacts our ability to learn we're not able to absorb and retain information in the same way if we're only paying attention to it every other cycle and it also just wastes a lot of energy it wastes brain power on the figuring out which piece to focus on now rather than giving that task it's all but the fact that multitasking is impossible doesn't stop this. It doesn't change the reality of our jobs and for this is not all my calendar fortunately this is this is trying to schedule a meeting with three colleagues but the fact that multitasking is impossible doesn't stop our jobs from requiring us to do a number of different very in some cases fundamentally different types of thinking over the course of the day. Many of us are programmers and technical work has a creative side but it also has a very deep logical side those are already things you have to switch between we're already also switching between our own personal dimensions and our work dimensions and if you still work from home I've been remote since before the pandemic but I've been working from home since the start of lockdown there's so many other things that are competing for our attention even beyond what we show on our calendars and we're constantly having to choose which of those to give our brain to at any given time so as we go through this I'd like you all to be thinking about the last week or so of work you've done and think about the different things that you've been asked to adapt to and to step through over the course of each day but also to think a little bit about which of those moments have felt really satisfying which days you've come away from feeling like yeah I got a lot done today and which just left you really tired context switching on that last note is in my opinion the only only a phrase that we raise when things are not going well we don't think of it as a context switch to wrap up work on time at the end of the day and go out and meet a friend at a bar we don't think of it as a context switch to you know use the restroom between meetings however cotidian and mundane you can get we don't think about the transitions that are automatic we don't think about the ones that are smooth when we say I've been doing a lot of context switching or I'm feeling really overloaded today that's usually because on that day there have been things where you've been feeling stuck you've been feeling like you've had trouble getting started on a new task you felt interrupted and that means that even though there's definitely times that we're overloaded we're this is the development and design track we're not going to go very code at all on this and I think I'm only going to say WordPress once more after this but we do have a responsibility as problem solvers to acknowledge that if there's something which works sometimes and doesn't work others we can diagnose that we can sort of debug it for lack of a better term and there is a risk that I've certainly fallen victim to to use context switching or all I'm being pulled in too many directions as an excuse to ignore underlying issues and to ignore the opportunity to work with my team and my manager and my clients to rearrange things in a way that's going to be more sustainable so what is it context switching in the context that we're talking about it today and I apologize for that repetition but it's just going to happen is something that we're going to be describing as a two step process it's a model that I got from an article by Kara Borenstein which I have linked at the end of the talk and it proposes that there's two steps when we are shifting from one task to the other Borenstein refers to these as goal selection and rule activation but those terms didn't click for me personally as well so we're going to be referring to them as priority selection and task adaptation I chose priority selection because in our work most things can or I might argue should come from some sense of pursuing a goal we need to prioritize our work so that we can be working on the thing that's going to be the best for us for making us money keeping us happy and goal shifting gives the sense that you're changing the direction you're going whereas more often during the course of the day all of the activities on our calendar might be oriented towards the same goal but what we're doing at any given moment is changing the path we're using towards it we're changing the priority of task that's going to move us towards that goal so for example we need to stop writing new code and help our client test the code that we've already delivered so that we can make sure that it works for them and get it out or I need to stop writing code because the turkey's about to catch fire we've all had that meeting that we don't want to be in or particularly over lockdown I think this happened a lot where there were so many things going on but somebody wanted to talk and you're half there your brains not shut off from what you're doing before if you're a programmer you've left your text editor open you're shifting back and forth they can see that by the way when the light on your face in the zoom changes what you get out of it at the end of the day is an hour of less productive work on what you didn't want to stop doing and a really half-hearted unsuccessful human interaction it's kind of a lose-lose situation and I don't have a solution to too many meetings but we can talk a little bit about how to make that piece easier by looking at the second step task adaptation we've determined that well we have to do this meeting the meeting is important whether it's with their boss whether it's with their cousin there is in progress work that we're doing what can we do to wrap that up in a way where it's going to let us more fully move on to the next thing this time using my programming example we commit the work in progress code temporarily we leave some notes I was trying to move the registration of the custom post type to this module and I'm getting an error because we just upgraded to php8 okay done that's going to be enough for me to remember exactly what I was trying to do after the call I can close my editor maybe set a slack reminder for an hour and 10 minutes or so to fire right after the meeting so that I can remember to ask somebody who's going to be coming online in another time zone this is very specific to my world but like you can sort of set things up to find ways to give closure even if it's temporary and then we fire up our zoom we jump on the meeting we walk down the hall to the conference room whatever it be but we do it with more of a clean conscience and we're more mentally invested in the new work I really like thinking about these steps independently because if we look at them in that level of granularity it's easier to see those points of friction where we can smooth off an edge here or there and make the entire process something that we can build up better habits about to give us the ability to stop trying to do too much at once looking at prioritization in that case because in my experience the friction of context is most felt when you have too many things to do and if multitasking is impossible then it's also pure fiction that will ever finish our to-do lists something always else comes into them but prioritization is a perennial topic for business of all kinds if you go to any conference somebody's going to be talking about how to choose what to do the more clear the goal the more easy it is to determine whether what the company's doing or whether what we're individually doing contributes towards it and it's a challenge when you're working for different companies as a freelancer or even in a large agency where they might have different goals but then hopefully you have your own goal as an individual to fall back on like what's keeping me whole in this situation and you're going to have to cut some things out I like language I like etymology and talk by Chris Flores staff engineer who I met earlier in the year really resonated with me by calling up the etymology of the word decide it actually comes from a root that means to cut to cut out so when you're deciding to do something you're not just selecting it you're also very mindfully selecting not to do the other thing and it's easy to get fed up in what feels important and to cut off the wrong things another talk that I saw recently by a data scientist named Ryan Harter was called strategies for focusing on the most important thing and being a data scientist Harter did an experiment where he wrote down over the course of several weeks why he felt like everything he was doing was the important thing to be doing at that time what he found was that there were several overarching categories of kind of default prioritization method that he was falling back on the first is what he called inertia it's easy to keep working on the thing you're working on if you're working in a team sometimes that's not actually the right thing to do sometimes there's a point where you should hand it off to a colleague who deserves a chance to get into that part of the code or maybe just has more time or more experience on that feature or maybe the project actually isn't that important anymore maybe it was something that you thought was going to be really good for your business but then you found a plug-in that does it better and you kind of still want to keep working on it but it's not actually providing you that value anymore if you're in a big company or have clients of any kinds I'm sure you're familiar with prioritization by decibels who's asking loudest or most frequently prioritization based on decibels is particularly dangerous because I think that as most of us grow in our careers we like to have the sense that we're providing influence in our jobs to our clients etc and it's very hard to mindfully strategically deploy influence if you're constantly reactive and prioritizing basic based on who's yelling at you the loudest is a very reactive mode it tends to hype us up and make us make more mistakes but it's very easy to do because they are quite loud and then guilt this one really gets me as an open source contributor there's always a long list of things that I just really would love to get to and those things are really really hard to take off of your to-do list but they aren't necessarily the top priority for you so I think I've seen probably five or six talks now that propose kind of going Mari Kondo on your to-do list periodically if you're not familiar it's a house cleaning strategy I'm also packing to move so we're doing this with physical objects as well but you pile all of your safe books in the living room you go through and you go man have a great library also I haven't touched any of them in a year which of these will be worth it for me to carry in my luggage for the new house and you take the three or four or in my case hundreds that you think fit that metric and then you let the others go periodically doing this with our priority lists helps us keep a little bit more of a lightness of weight of undone to-dos and there's questions you can ask that address each of these different default prioritization failures or priorities as a default prioritization I don't know what's a good word not good strategies if you want to combat inertia first of all you can say if you're working with anyone else is this something that I can delegate if you're not you can say like is this what I should be working on are there alternatives that I could use does this have to get done a really good one is what happens if I don't do it this helps with the decibels piece because in a lot of cases what's very important to the person you're working with at that moment might not actually ever be your top priority and they might actually have the tools to solve it themselves it's not necessarily the easiest conversation to go through that but in a lot of cases we've ended up in situations where there wasn't actually any fallout for not taking on the task that was asked loudly and the process of helping them understand that they needed to solve themselves and had the tools to do so ends it up having much better outcome long-term and then finally just to make sure that you're keeping your business in yourself whole which of these is going to continue to drive most directly at the value of work that I'm doing and then also which is going to make me feel like I had a really good and satisfying week at the end of the week because that's an important feeling to be able to carry through into your weekends one talk that particularly stuck with me to help with this sense of prioritization was by the aforementioned staff engineer named chris floris called say no to burnout at a conference earlier and she argued that once you're senior enough to have run out of time which is a very low bar for seniority I think we all hit that quite early then you need to abandon the idea of a to-do list you can't do a to-do list anymore you've got to go for a priority queue a queue is a concept that we use in computer science among other places it's an ordered list but things can be popped off the top they can also fall off the bottom and when you're crunched for time having the sense that what you need to do is always ordered is very helpful because when you're asked for something new you can ask about its priority you can say all right well yesterday you asked me to do bc and a and today you're asking for x y and z where do those slot in relative to each other it's an opportunity to reinterrogate the priority of the things you're already doing and it's also an opportunity to understand that not everything that you've had this person come running to you to ask for today is going to be at the top of the queue and because there's only finite hours in the day we also need to acknowledge that there's only a couple items at the top that we're actually going to be able to get to and everything else is below the waterline we'll either get to it tomorrow or reevaluate it or maybe if one of the things ends up getting done really fast or we get someone else to come in and help we can pull some up but we need to be realistic that we can't do everything and we need to make sure that we're doing the right things once we have this shorter list that's actually approachable then we start getting into the question of how do we work through it in the most efficient way and if you do various types of work you've probably already subconsciously thought about batching together the ones that share the same type of function like if you write in code write a bunch of code at once if you're doing reviews do a whole bunch of reviews at once try to group your meetings together so that if you know maybe you get to do all of the interpersonal stuff in a batch and you don't have to sort of remember how to put your smiling face on in between solving other complicated problems there's a lot of studies that show that the psychological penalty of switching between tasks is highest when those tasks are very different and particularly when they're different and we're not really used to them so consolidating the ones that are similar removes some of that penalty by keeping us in the same mindset over the course of a number of items that we have to get through it's not really a post pandemic talk unless you try to overextend a metaphor from something you binge during lockdown so in my case we're going to go to motorsports and I watched Drive to Survive on Netflix there's a concept in auto racing of the racing line it's the fastest path around a corner and it's not usually the physically shortest because if you make a really sharp turn and you can think about this as a human who's running you don't have to pretend about a car if you need to make a really sharp turn you kind of have to stop and then start again in the other direction you're using a lot of energy to stop you're also using a lot of energy to get running again if you go around in a curved fashion you don't have to stop running you can keep your speed and momentum up much more easily and then you don't have to burn nearly as much fuel accelerating out of that corner into the new thing stopping work stopping a task isn't usually the thing that we struggle with the most if we're feeling like we're not getting through our day very well it's usually that the new thing that we're trying to get into is not clicking yet and if you can give yourself that speed boost going into that task you get up to speed at the new task faster a different metaphor I've got a bunch of things to do this weekend here in Montclair I live in Manhattan my best friend lives in Jersey City if I have a set of errands to run I could go back and forth randomly between these three places if I really like tunnels and trains but I'm spending a lot of time money fuel and energy and rage depending on the tunnel in the time of day going back and forth instead I chose to come directly to Montclair enjoy this lovely conference and then move back via Jersey City to the city uh we're too sorry Manhattan um if you do your errands in a loop then you're not backtracking you're not wasting that energy um and you can also adapt this based on which one you think might take the longest or which one is going to give you the perishable stuff that you're going to need to put in the fridge when you come home so we have the mental ability that we exercise daily to try to optimize these types of tasks we can deploy that when we're trying to look at our calendar and think about well how do I get through this the other thing that we do when we're running errands is that we know which ones are going to take longer and you time box the visit to the chatty cousin you time box the amount of time that you let the kid spend in the toy store depending on what it is that you're doing we we put these arbitrary limits on how much time we're allowing to spend there because any kind of task takes up as much time as we give it in bureaucracy this is called Parkinson's law and the same phenomenon happens with the individual tasks we do if we're given a week to accomplish something we will find a way to make it take a week this is one of the reasons why in scrum and in agile teams we break big tasks down it's not just because it's easier to determine whether you've done it or not if it's a very concrete discrete task it's also that it's a lot harder to procrastinate if you have a very clearly defined discrete task it's kind of a way that we hack our brains to divide and conquer the work we need to do to figure out how to squeeze them in in the right place deadlines in a lot of cases actually cause procrastination i struggle with this i've always been a procrastinator i've always been the sort of person that pulls together something great at the end and then when you don't pull something together great it's like well i could have done it if i just stayed up that extra hour and then you're that much tired more tired the next day if a piece of work is really big the two good options you have are to try to take a piece to get started and find an existing hard deadline in your day like a meeting and say i'm going to do this before that meeting i don't really want to do it it's complicated but i need to take that first step and i'm looking forward to that call so let's do the hard bit to start have something fun and then i will have started when i come back or alternatively you can try to arrange things in your day and your calendar to leave you a big enough time that you feel like you're going to be able to immerse yourself in it but i've tried that a lot it's very difficult to find that time and something is always going to come up and interrupt it so knowing your own work habits is also the way to figure out which of these sort of carrot approaches you might need to understand how do i start this intractably huge task that i have in front of me and just take that first step to begin building up that momentum going back to the meeting example at the beginning once you have done anything keep track of it write it down this is actually really important and i know that we don't really like status updates we don't like filling out end of day notes for those of us that have to do that type of thing it's like i know what i did yesterday but i took a sick day this week when i got back i went to pick the work that i've been working on up and i realized that i hadn't filled out my end of day notes the day before i was out i had no memory of what i had been working on and it was less than 48 hours ago it's really really easy for us to lose those threads if certain things happen and we do benefit a lot by being able to go back and say all right yeah this was exactly where i was working on not just us but also our colleagues my colleagues Miguel and Pam have helped our team build a great culture of giving periodic position checks we use slack for chat within our team and we'll post periodically before stepping away for lunch say this is what i've been working on this is this there's something weird going on here might want to chat with you about it this afternoon and by doing that it's not because we feel like we are or need to be micromanaged it's sort of a generosity towards our colleagues to let us all have a bit more proprioception about what everyone else in the group is doing when they might need to come to us so that we can begin to prepare to make time for that and it also most importantly helps us remember well have i done anything today because we've all had those days it doesn't feel good to write down i have accomplished nothing of value but it's really important because if you're accomplishing nothing of value you need to do something to change that because somebody is going to get mad at you whether it's you or your boss or your cat i don't know leaving those breadcrumbs for yourself just makes the process of remembering where you were at jumping between tasks run a little bit smoother and it happens at all levels of organization if you are working on a project that has a list of to-do ticket items having good hygiene when filling those out is really important having it really clearly stated what outcome for my business or my client's business are we expected to have solved or improved at the end of this work what assumptions did we make when we said that this was only going to take one day because i'm looking at it now and i think it's a little more complicated what prior art is there which other who wrote this ticket like who can i go to for information about it having that stuff written down makes it easier for us to take on that work and then figure out how to start working through it and as we break these down to be more granular it's a great sort of thing where if you just don't feel like you're getting anything done in a day you can pick one of those really small tickets up and say change the color of the label on the menu i think i can probably do that i'm having a pretty tough day but it's a block editor control bringing that attitude back into our code uh there was uh nicholas zakis is a writer who's done a lot of work in the javascript community and created es lintz a tool for checking the quality of your javascript code and years and years ago when i was just learning programming i saw a talk of his where he made the joke that the only time that we are programming is when we have opened up a new blank file and we are writing out the first couple of lines in it as soon as we look away from the screen when we look back we are now debugging and refactoring because that code was written by someone else it was us five minutes ago but it's effectively someone else at times and you have to use energy to remember what a piece of code does even if you wrote it um raise your hand if you've ever been looking at code and thought who wrote this and then realized a lot of hands the flip side of end of day notes helping you remember what it was you were working on is that they can also help free you from having to the writing things down helps with something called attention residue and the metaphor overextended metaphor i chose for this section is the floor of a dive bar in health's kitchen called rudies where you get a free hot dog if you order a beer um there's a certain tackiness to the floor a certain like when you lift your shoe up it's gross i don't know i haven't been there in a few years maybe they clean the place i doubt it but that sort of sense of just accumulated stuff that sticks when you move through it that's how i like to think about attention residue because when we leave work unfinished and don't give ourselves a way to have our brains regard it as done our brains hold on to that the zygarnik effect is a phenomenon observed in psychology where incomplete work sticks in our heads whether we want it to or not our brains hang on to that unfinished task and with code in particular we'll be chipping away at this big problem and we'll be thinking about it overnight we'll be thinking about it while we're talking with our friends that's where the context switched to the bar is not smooth when your brain's still at work but you're at the bar that's very awkward i don't like feeling like that that's why those eureka moments in the shower are possible your brain's been churning away at that but it's not been able to let it go and that can really hurt work-life balance the flip of this is that once something is considered done our brains can just say farewell and move on to the next thing the way we've been talking i had an old colleague once claimed that he solved a bug in a dream at the time i was i think it was my first full time hired as a programmer job i thought this is so cool this guy's amazing he writes code all the time in his dreams but i actually now feel really bad because that means that it was kicking around in his brain all night documenting where we get to giving ourselves permission to say the answer to what i was doing is in this place i can go get it if i want there's another effect called the google effect which is that we don't tend to remember things that we think we can go look up really easily let's use that to our advantage let's give our brains a break from having to hold on to things and say my end of day notes are in the channel the ticket is updated it is time to go to the park a final way that caraborenstein who i mentioned earlier talks about for keeping the flow as you're moving between tasks is standardization if you're using a different type of bug tracker for one part of the project than the other that's going to be a lot more disruptive than if you're using a consistent set of tools even with a consistent color scheme dark mode or light mode i don't personally feel like this is one that trips me up most of the time and the exception to this is when i talk to our project managers who have to deal with projects that are using zinhub and github issues and jira and asana and you know we're switching between microsoft teams and zoom for different calls throughout the day there are a lot of ways in which we don't sit there and think like this is a big problem but then we take a step back and realize it's actually a lot of paper cuts that add up to be really annoying so we don't necessarily have a choice about this in all cases we might have to use those tools but you can at least recognize that that's part of where your energy and your brain cells are going as with all paper cuts they are hard to notice so this is i'm including this mostly just to keep us open to the idea of thinking about when you try that shortcut in a program that doesn't work for the eighth time yeah all right yeah okay that's what's happening it's not photoshop prioritization is tough because we're not always in control there's definitely cases where something comes in that makes us drop everything we were doing raise your hand if you've ever been the person to notice that the client side is down those drop anything moments thankfully in our world websites rarely have life or death consequences like to keep it that way but we can learn a lot from how emergency responders operate they train really hard so that in a crisis they fall back on muscle memory and have it because those are reliable things the way that we act all the time is going to be the way that we act in a crisis and the i'm not talking about the way that we act in sort of like putting on a persona it's like when we're unguarded like let's figure out how to make that person able to roll with these punches better if we've been documenting our tasks as we go there's less that is undocumented or incomplete that we're going to be dropping if we have to drop everything if we've kept our set of committed priority tasks fairly trim and we've been communicative about that there's less that goes undone when you have to change focus to deal with an emergency and if we're used to delegating or have the ability to do so because we don't all it's easier for us to describe what needs to be done and hand it off quickly to someone else to make room for more work if we treat context switching as a skill that we can build over time we get better at that skill and we're never going to be perfect at it context switching is really annoying having to go back and forth between meetings for seven different clients really takes it out of you but you can definitely improve at it for the priority side to review we can't do everything we should admit it if we're not being honest with ourselves about that then we have a big problem it's our job to challenge that and say how could i do more i want to be more productive or your manager's job to say i think you can probably do more but we need to at least have that conversation we need to reinterrogate whether the things that we were working on remain top priority or not we want to understand why things feel important and to understand to figure out how to diagnose when the things that feel important may not actually be the ones that are the most impactful and we really do benefit from delegating when we can in terms of transitioning between tasks batch them as much as you can find the racing line find the sequence of things in your day that is going to keep you moving but also give you the smoothest turn around each of your corners leave time before a meeting to wrap stuff up so that you're not scrambling during the beginning of the meeting leave time before going to pick up a friend or a family member to write down what it was that you were doing at the end of the day that time takes time but it saves you time in the long run you're making in investments in what was i doing that will pay itself off the day after in the day after that avoid attention residue don't go to bars with sticky floors let it go just give yourself the the authority and the trust to say i know where to go to get the information to move this forward so i don't need to carry it with me right now it'll make everything you do that day a little lighter as a bonus i was chatting with our ceo recently and he had referenced an article that was making the case that all leadership decisions in a big company should have a url because anything that leadership is working on should be known and findable that's something i've started doing for myself like i try not to keep these notes in a private place on my computer where only i know how to get them because then if i am forgetful or indisposed or need to collaborate with anyone else then there's a lot more work needed to expose that information to them transparency can be hard it doesn't work in every type of company but giving yourself the ability to show to your colleagues the decisions and choices you've made about which things you're working on can be really powerful in the right team and above all it doesn't always work sometimes we're just overwhelmed sometimes there are too many meetings there are too many bugs there is no way that we are getting to launch on thursday i'm sorry being able to say i need help prioritizing and calibrating my work or i'm stuck i'm not making any progress on any of these tasks is hard and also depends on being in a context where you're working with people who can listen to you whether they're your co-workers or not and you're not just imposing on friends for that it's an important skill to be able to say those things but if we dismiss it as something that can't be shared we lose the ability to rubber duck chat with chat tbt about it maybe anonymize your client names but honestly it's just having the ability to talk out why you're not able to get going on something is really powerful we have these options for us to unblock what we're working on and take care of ourselves a little bit more because i still see a lot of burnout i've definitely been feeling it between the ongoing lingering effects of the pandemic and all of the layoffs that have happened in the world over the past number of months between all of the sort of start-stop things that we do socially as different groups of friends come back online at different times and in different ways we're using a lot of energy more than we would like to be at navigating our personal life and our professional lives we need to recognize that and try to figure out how these same skills around keeping track of what you're doing and letting yourself let go of some of it that can protect your work-life balance and you need to guard that because if we let that fall you're going to get a lot less done if you're sick or if you're really burned out than if you're just feeling slightly overwhelmed don't let context switching be an excuse to ignore underlying process issues i've almost always when i've complained about context switching really meant i don't want to do x or i'm having trouble doing y those are much more functional and interesting conversations to have with yourself or your manager than there's too much to do that's a difficult thing to start on because yes all of those things need to get done you're hurting your work and happiness if you don't open the conversation to start talking through how do we make this less frustrating how do we make it less annoying to switch from this task to the other is there ways that i can rearrange the order of them is there are there ways that i can choose one thing that i won't do and agree on that with your colleagues in exchange for actually being able to succeed at all the rest depending on your work environment it's a lot of different options but you aren't able to start on that process unless we are actually inspecting those points of friction and thinking about what it is that's really annoying about a particular transition rather than just the transition exists the slides for this talk are online i would encourage watching some of the talks and reading some of the books share the link in the next slide so maybe take a picture of that one thank you do we have time for some questions cool thank you when you're working on your contact switching and you're going to all these things that you listen and at some point you just get your mind like you're trying to go through this process everything you put in your mind just gets stuck and i guess this is not an easy question to answer maybe if that was an answer but like how do you kind of overcome that your own personal stubbornness all right the question was how do you overcome your own personal stubbornness when you're switching tasks and it's difficult i struggle with that i think everybody does that's where being able to talk to somebody else even if it's the proverbial rubber duck on your desk or chatbot or your cat my cat's a really really good rubber duck manager um my brother's cat i wish i had a cat but the answer is it's tough um recognizing that you're doing it is the first step i feel like usually we at some level of our consciousness do recognize when we're just putting our own self in our cells way i've been working on that i wish i had a better answer but just admit it talk about it and then figure out maybe what's the smallest piece that would at least move you one step forward that's how i normally approach it the question is if you're an ambivalent person and you work on something and the next day you wake up and think no that wasn't the right way at all but then you keep looping in that way is there is there a way to bust out of that um that really is gonna i don't know enough about you i think i can imagine for myself how this would work but for me what i would probably do would be we'll say all right well if we've taken the first step in eight different directions let's take the second step and the one that feels good now and then at least then we'll have moved a little bit further and that'll give us more opportunity to look at the others and maybe say all right well we can throw some of those out and then it i don't know it's it's tough because there isn't a surefire way to tell what's going to be the most successful other than testing it and to test it you have to build it and to build it you have to decide to do it um having someone else to talk through it with i find is really useful uh very few major inventions despite all of our myths about inventors were created by individuals most of them were created by teams and a team can be of any shape and size uh but having someone else there to vet those decisions is probably the most powerful thing if you're able to find it do you have any resources i like what you were saying about the end of day notes and that position check that but as a team of one i mean i can write it in my new ability app but do you have any other resources for um where i can put that where in the hopefully in your future and like team growth it would be accessible is it slack is that the way i should where i should look for now and isn't that as the team growth or do you interesting interesting question so for the recording it was if you're a team of one and you're trying to document what your decisions are and your status and all of that how do you choose where to put that if you're planning to grow that team and try to share what you're doing with other people is it slack no slack is um there's a i don't know if it's true or not but i was told that the name stood for the searchable log of all like something and knowledge or conversations and knowledge slack search is actually okay so it's great for for example you've hit a error message you can look through your slack history and see if any of your colleagues have hit the same error it's not good for keeping and ordered anything it is as mercurial as conversations are something that automatic the company behind wordpress.com and also my company human made do is that we run networks of very small wordpress sites where we basically use them as note pads that are publicly accessible. The original plugin was called P2 so that's frequently what we refer to them as but P2 or it didn't happen is a slogan within several companies in our space where if you make a decision in slack or if you have an update that needs to live beyond the light of the current day put it onto a website issue tracker is just deciding that you're going to use Asana and that's where things are going to use and their free plan you know like figuring out what tool is going to match the amount of information that you need to store is a challenge and takes time to experiment and also look around to see what other people have done I know I think I saw at least one thing on co-host a site around where someone had gone through dozens of personal note-taking apps and done pros and cons of all of them those types of things usually give me some inspiration about what's going to leave me at the end of the day with the tool that other colleagues are going to resonate with and use. Do we have time for one more? Okay, sorry. Okay, can I say one thing first? Can we get a round of applause for all of the Montclair State University students running BAB? All of the recording and videography has been great and thank you all.