What I learned when I gave up my daily to-do list and tried ‘task-batching’

When it comes to productivity, there is no shortage of tips. I’ve tried many of them (some of which I’ve written about for this publication). But in the end, I’ve largely stuck to a similar practice: I have a to-do list ranked from most important to least important each day. This system has worked well enough for me. Or so I thought. The last couple of months, multiple life distractions have resulted in less time flexibility. This meant that I had to learn to be efficient with the time I did have. One of the things I’d noticed is that I tended to get a lot done when I grouped similar tasks together. So, I started ‘task-batching’ on a daily basis. I was expecting some improvement. But after a week I soon realized that I’d been doing this productivity thing all wrong. The cost of context-switching It turns out that the culprit for my yo-yo in productivity was context-switching. As the term implies, it means switching from one type of task to another. The term originated in the world of computing, where the central processing unit (the CPU) stops working on one process; it then stores and saves it so you can return to it later, and then starts working on another. (A pract…