I can't stand context switching. My most productive work days are the ones where I can focus on one thing at a time for hours on end. I've bought noise-cancelling headphones and earmuffs to keep the distractions at bay. At work I hold our no-meetings-allowed flow days sacred. I don't think I'm saying anything new by disparaging context switching.
So when I watched a fantastic talk by Allison Kaptur the other day, the section on context switching surprised the heck out of me:
"All the energy you spend re-loading all that context and trying to remember what you were doing ... is good for your long-term learning. You're more likely to retain later-on the thing you really had to work to retrieve."
I had heard about the memory benefits of disfluent fonts (there's even Sans Forgetica, specifically designed to be difficult to read), so it makes some sense to me that the effort of regaining lost focus could help in the long term.
Am I going to ask my wife to text me fake emergencies at random intervals, or set up a bot to interrupt me throught the day? Probably not. But when I am pulled out of focused work, at least I'll have a silver lining to consider.
