Effective Tips for Context Switching
Summary
See this cartoon found at This Is Why You Shouldnt Interrupt a Programmer for a great illustration why context switching can be hard for software developers. Keeping track of the “big” picture is helpful for daily and weekly goals, but a secondary to-do list with tasks that take just a few minutes is also essential. Create a calendar invite with our manager, tech lead, a SME (Subject Matter Expert), an architect, asking for help for later this afternoon or first thing tomorrow morning. The idea is that sensory stimuli will trigger specific memories that were embedded at the time the details of that sense were first (or most recently) encountered. Much of the psychology behind this has been to treat traumatic events (such as PTSD), but more recently has been expanded to study the senses’ ability to improve memory formation and recall.
