Reducing Workflow Switching for Engineers

🔥 We tracked one of our senior engineers for a week. Not surveillance. A voluntary experiment. He logged every interruption. Every context switch. Every "got a minute?" The results were painful. 📊 Monday through Friday: → 40 hours "at work" → 11 hours in meetings → 6 hours responding to Slack → 4 hours on code reviews → 2.5 hours on email and admin → Deep, uninterrupted coding: 8 hours. Total. For the week. 😤 8 hours of deep work in a 40-hour week. And we were paying him a senior engineer's salary to spend 80% of his time NOT engineering. 🤔 The math that changed our approach: Every context switch costs ~23 minutes to regain deep focus. He was switching context 7-8 times per day. That's 2.5+ hours of daily "reboot time" — pure waste. ✅ What we changed: → No-meeting mornings (9am-12pm = sacred deep work) → Slack goes async by default. Urgent = call. → Code reviews batched to 2pm-3pm → Questions collected and asked in batches, not one-by-one 📊 Result after 3 months: → Deep work went from 8 hours/week to 22 hours/week → Feature velocity nearly doubled → Engineer satisfaction went up (people like building things) Your best engineers don't need more hours. They need fewer interruptions. What would your team's deep-work-to-meeting ratio look like if you measured it? #Engineering #DeepWork #Productivity #CTO

Last month, a blinking cursor quietly stole six hours of my life. A deadline breathed down my neck while tabs multiplied like rabbits and promised shortcuts they couldn’t deliver. Every “best” tool missed the simple job I needed done right now. Then it clicked. Stop hunting perfect. Start fitting tools to the work in front of you. Here’s the part that hurt. Each switch costs about 23 minutes to regain focus, so ten switches can nuke a full afternoon of deep work. And the average company already runs 93 apps, while large enterprises juggle 231, so tool sprawl is quietly eating your week. The FOCUS Method used with clients and teams today: 1️⃣ Function first: define one job to be done in plain language before testing. 2️⃣ Output quality: test on your data, score clarity and accuracy on a 1–5 scale. 3️⃣ Cost vs value: tie price to a metric like minutes saved or error rate reduced. 4️⃣ Usability: pick what people can learn in an afternoon and actually adopt. 5️⃣ Speed: time to first useful result under 5 minutes, or it won’t stick. A stack that talks to each other beats a drawer full of shiny tools. Writing, email, meetings: Microsoft 365 Copilot. Users were 29% faster on core tasks and nearly 4x faster catching up on missed meetings in controlled studies. Code: GitHub Copilot in VS Code to draft functions, tests, and docstrings where you already work. Data storytelling: Power BI (or Gamma) with Copilot to draft visuals and executive summaries directly from your model. Communication: Teams with Copilot for meeting notes, decisions, and action items without leaving your hub. What changed results for me wasn’t a miracle app. It was starting from workflow, choosing native integrations, and running 30-day pilots with hard metrics before scaling. Three moves you can run this week: 1️⃣Map one painful workflow end to end and mark the two slowest steps. 2️⃣Pilot one tool in your primary suite with five users and measure minutes saved and quality deltas. 3️⃣ Kill one redundant app once the pilot works and reallocate that budget to adoption training. What’s your biggest time‑waster when picking AI tools, and where do you feel the most context switching tax right now ?

If your engineers are spending more time managing paperwork than managing processes, that is not a productivity problem. That is a workflow problem. And workflow problems have solutions. I recently met an engineer, his name is Faizal. A Senior process engineer. Twelve years with the company. The kind of guy who knew every machine on the floor by sound alone. Every time something changed on the production line, Faizal was the one who caught it. A valve adjustment. A pressure tweak. A sequence that needed updating because a vendor changed their specs last minute. He would scribble it down in his notebook first. Then type it up. Then send it to his supervisor for sign-off. Then the supervisor would bring it to the weekly ops meeting. The meeting would run long because someone always had questions. Someone else was not in the room. They would schedule a follow-up. Meanwhile, Faizal’s change note sat in an email thread, buried under thirty replies. By the time the paper form made its way through department heads, got printed, signed, scanned, and filed into a cabinet on level three, two weeks had passed. Sometimes more. And sometimes, the form never came back at all. He once spent forty minutes searching for an approved change note from eight months ago. A compliance audit was coming. The document existed. He had seen it. He just could not find it. On day, he told his manager: “I spend more time chasing paper than I do solving actual problems.” His manager nodded. He had heard this before. From other engineers. In other departments. Across different sites. The problem was not Faizal. The problem was a process built for a time when paper was the only option. When Faizal’s company moved their change management workflow into DocuWare, a few things happened almost immediately. Change notes were submitted digitally, with version control. Approvals happened through automated routing, no more chasing signatures across floors. Every document was timestamped, traceable, and retrievable in seconds. And the audit that used to take days of frantic searching, took under an hour. Faizal still carries his notebook. Old habits. But now it is just for his own thinking. Everything else has a proper home. What does your change management process look like today?

🧵 Bioinformaticians: Drowning in multiple projects? Here's why context switching is killing your productivity—and how to fix it. 1/ Too many projects = too little progress. When your attention is scattered, your output drops. Context switching is the silent killer. 2/ Each project has its own biology: 🧬 Different TFs 🧪 Different cell lines ⚙️ Different pipelines Switching eats mental energy. 3/ Example: Jumping from CUT&RUN on H3K27me3 in mESCs to ChIP-seq on c-Myc in HeLa = full brain reboot. 4/ You spend time recalling: • QC parameters • Genome version • Where peaks are saved • Which scripts and tools you used 5/ And if the project isn't organized, you’ll waste even more time digging through old folders, scratch files, or rerunning commands. 6/ Solution 1: Ruthless prioritization Pick ONE project each day. Focus. Finish. Ship it. Half-done science doesn’t help anyone. Multitasking is a trap. 7/ Solution 2: Use consistent folder structures Example: project_name/ ├── raw_data/ ├── fastqc/ ├── trimmed/ ├── alignment/ ├── results/ ├── scripts/ 8/ Solution 3: Add a README to each project Include: • Data source • Goals • Key results • Analysis steps • TODOs This saves hours when switching context or collaborating. document as much as possible. it may seem to be a waste of time, but it saves you time long term 9/ Solution 4: Keep a running log Markdown or plain text. Example: ## 2025-04-10 - Trimmed reads with fastp - Aligned with bowtie2 (hg38) - Called peaks with macs2 10/ Key Takeaways: • Switching projects costs time and focus • Finish one before hopping to another • Structure + notes = less rework 11/ ✅ Action items: • Choose 1 project to focus on this week • Create folder structure & README • Start a daily or weekly log 12/ Deep work leads to deep insights. Prioritize. Organize. Write it down. Make future-you thank today-you. I hope you've found this post helpful. Follow me for more. Subscribe to my FREE newsletter https://lnkd.in/erw83Svn

🚫 How I Wasted 5 Weeks a Year Without Even Realizing It For 20+ years, I taught leaders how to run efficient organizations and teams. Optimize meetings. Streamline decisions. Eliminate waste. I thought I had efficiency mastered. Until I realized how much of my own time I was wasting. When I joined Amazon, my team of technologists and architects kept saying: “We’re drowning in context switching.” I shrugged it off. I’d been doing that my whole career — juggling meetings, emails, and messages like a “badge of honor.” Then COVID hit. The workday became a blur of back-to-back calls, Slack pings, texts, and inbox chaos. I thought I was coping. I wasn’t. While the pandemic has thankfully passed, its remnants of video calls and the above distractions remain! 🔍 Then I came across an HBR study (“How Much Time and Energy Do We Waste Toggling Between Applications?, Murty, Dadlani, and Das, Aug 2022) that changed everything. In typical HBR fashion, the authors called it “toggle tax”—the cost you pay each time you shift contexts. It showed that the average knowledge worker toggles between apps and windows 1,200 times a day — losing up to 4 hours per week just refocusing. That’s five full weeks a year, gone! So I changed my ways. Here’s what worked 👇 🧠 1. Block time, ruthlessly. Deep work deserves sacred space. I started reserving 60-minute focus blocks every morning — no meetings, no Slack, no email. 📵 2. Batch the reactive work. I try and check email and messages 2–3 times a day instead of constantly grazing. If it’s urgent, people know how to find me. (Note: This is REAL hard for me; I am a work in progress). ⚙️ 3. Eliminate tool chaos. I look to streamline systems and consolidate workflows so my teams aren’t bouncing between platforms. The result? My productivity doubled. My energy returned. And for the first time in years, my calendar stopped managing me. 🔍 If you’ve ever felt stretched thin but can’t explain why— it might not be you. It might be you paying the “toggle tax.” ⚡What’s one change you’ve made to protect your focus? Want to chat with me about wasting 5 weeks a year and minimizing the “toggle tax.”? See my calendar link in the comments to schedule a video call.

Stop treating AI like a search engine and start using it as an extension of your engineering workflow. 🛠️ As an AI Engineer, I don't just use these tools to "chat", I use them to reclaim at least 2 hours of my day from high-friction, low-signal tasks. In Day 8 of my #30DaysOfAIExplained series, I’m breaking down the 4 specific ways I leverage AI to stay in "flow state" longer: >> The Synthesizer: Turning 10-page technical docs into 3 actionable bullets. >> The Friction-Reducer: Auto-formatting messy meeting brain-dumps into structured Jira tickets. >> The Tone-Shifter: Reframing blunt critiques into constructive, scalable feedback. >> The Rubber Duck: Validating logic and spotting architectural flaws before the first PR. The best part? You don't need a massive corporate budget. Every resource listed in this deck has a powerful free tier. Which of these is already in your daily rotation? Or did I miss your favorite "secret" tool? Let’s talk in the comments. 💬 #GenAI #LLMs #Productivity #AIEngineer

A lot of my colleagues are just starting to use AI agents in their daily work. Most people learn quickly: agents are powerful, but context management is the skill. And one of the simplest habits I coach is: when a new idea pops up mid-task, don't ask the agent to solve both at once. Instead, tell the agent to capture the new idea in whatever requirements system you have established and continue with your current work. Why this works: → The agent keeps context on what you're actually doing right now → Your new idea gets documented with the context you just discussed → You pick it up later when the agent references your requirements Without this, work gets fragmented. You end up context-switching inside a single thread, and then you’re frustrated when the agent starts to drift. This works for software features, long-form writing, or any other task. Think of it like a “parking lot” for your AI conversations. Capture, don't context-switch. Humans can hold "now" and "future ideas" in parallel pretty easily (even if we forget that shower thought later). AI agents can technically do this too, but their performance degrades as context gets crowded. The more you pile into a single conversation, the more likely the agent is to lose track of details, contradict earlier decisions, or wander from the goal. Keeping them focused on one task at a time isn't a workaround; it's how you get their best work. Capture, don’t context-switch

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗸𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗱𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘀? Context switching. You send a colleague a "quick" Slack message. Takes you 𝟱 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗱𝘀, but it costs them 𝟮𝟯 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝘂𝘁𝗲𝘀 to get back into deep focus. Now imagine this happening 5-10 times a day. Your best engineers aren't shipping slow. We keep breaking their flow. It takes about 𝟭𝟱 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝘂𝘁𝗲𝘀 of uninterrupted work to reach flow state. One notification can break it, even if the developer never opens it. Here is what helps: - 𝗗𝗲𝗳𝗮𝘂𝗹𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝘀𝘆𝗻𝗰. Not everything needs an instant reply - 𝗕𝗹𝗼𝗰𝗸 𝗳𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲. Protect 2-4 hours for deep work daily - 𝗕𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵 𝗾𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀. Combine five scattered pings into one message - 𝗗𝗼𝗰𝘂𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝘀𝘄𝗲𝗿𝘀. If it's asked twice, write it down once One team I worked with blocked focus time for a month. Story completion went up 𝟯𝟱%. Bug reports dropped 𝟮𝟴%. Stop treating your team's focus like it's free. It's the most expensive resource you have. 👉 Learn more about it: https://lnkd.in/dwi2XbXG

Want to be a great software engineer? Use time blocking. Carve your day into large time blocks. I like 4 hours in the morning and 2 in the afternoon. During these blocks, your only job is to produce your highest value work. No emails. No Slack. Pure, undiluted focus. Your brain need long blocks of time to solve complex problems: - Initial ramp-up time: It takes 15-30 minutes to reach flow state - Context retention: Uninterrupted work allows your brain to hold more context - Creativity: Solutions often only emerge after extended focus Implementation tips: - Block your calendar: Make these times visible to others - Signal unavailability: Use status indicators, headphones, or physical signs - Batch interruptions: Have designated times for responding to messages - Prepare your environment: Remove distractions before starting - Set clear objectives: Know exactly what you plan to accomplish

If you’re a backend engineer, you know this feeling. You’re in the zone, crushing it, and then … A notification comes across your screen. “Got a sec to hop on a quick call?” “Can you review my PR real quick?” “Just a quick question when you’re free…” Every ping pulls you out of your flow. And context switching? It’s brutal. Protect your focus. • Batch your communication windows. • Block off time on your calendar. • Set Slack to Do Not Disturb. Even 1–2 hours of uninterrupted focus can change your whole day. Illustration by: Ash Lamb