Context switching anxiety - why you feel pulled to context switch mindlessly

All of this illustrated what might be termed the paradox of limitation, which runs through everything that follows: the more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the invevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead—and work with them, rather than against them—the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.

— Oliver Burkeman, Time Management for Mortals

Limitations create expansiveness, of ideas, task choices, partner choices, friend choices, and more. While this may feel counterintuitive at first, limitations are a key pillar of creativity, and of living life more generally. Choosing what to choose from a wide array of menu items in your task list or pool of possible romantic partners is overwhelmingly daunting because you do not even know where to start. Starting is fundamental nonetheless, because it propels your choice process, providing a fulcrum to gain momentum. Momentum can push you forward towards constraints and decisive choices that account for the inherent finitude of your existence.

In the context of work more particularly, context switching is often deemed destructive to productivity and well-being, while at the same time very alluring to the primitive human brain. Context switching refers to working on multiple tasks in short sequences of action, often almost at the same time, switching back and forth between different activities that may require separate types of efforts and locus of attention. This may be switching every few minutes between chatting with a colleague on Slack and writing a report, for example. Arguably, this practice benefits your colleague, who is getting your answers rapidly and can feel less anxious about his existence at the moment, and does not benefit the writing of the report, which appears to recruit a deeper area of your attention focus, drawing upon more resources than exchanging messages with another individual. As a consequence, your attention is split between two modes of operating almost at the same time, drawing upon more cognitive resources and potentially draining your willpower more rapidly. This is the scatterbrain approach, as Chris Bailey puts it in his book.

The allure of context-switching lies mostly in the sense of existential anxiety you may often feel regarding your work and life in general. There are many things you could attend to right now, and many of them are palatable and could be beneficial. So why cut short the range of possibilities? Why narrow your attention to one thing at a time, sequentially and with intention? This prospect may feel scary to the limbic brain, particularly when the range of potential activities you may attend to at any given moment involves other human beings. Such a factor can add a layer of primitive anxiety of missing out on the call from someone else, or the email, or the instant message in a chat app. This can create anxiety due to fear of missing out on important information, as well as being cut off from the tribe of which you and the other person are a part. Being cut out from the tribe, especially when your identity is not well-differentiated and you are not part of multiple tribes, can feel incredibly scary because you would experience isolation and a lowering of your social status concerning others.

So what, you may continue tinkering following the line of reasoning above. At the core of your humanness, you may seek love and a feeling of belonging to something. A higher sense of freedom and acceptance of the deleterious effects of context switching to your effectiveness and well-being can be unlocked via the realization that reality is as it is, and its meaning is given by your thoughts, which are often cognitively distorted. There is finitude in your choices anyway due to the finite nature of your existence, and deciding to experience well-being begins with your transcendence of the inherent fear of missing out on the infinite pool of possibilities in the banquet of life before you.