David Sparks on Switching Gears Intentionally

David Sparks' latest newsletter featured some details on how he’s handling the significant challenges that can arise when context and task switching get out of control.

From his newsletter (also a post on Macsparky):

The hard part isn’t the next thing. It’s the last thing. Your brain wants to keep chewing on the project you just walked away from, and it will happily do that while you’re supposed to be doing something else.

Man, isn’t this the truth. His solution involves something near and dear to my heart (and a little newsletter I keep chugging away at): Interstitial journaling. The idea is that when you finish something, instead of jumping right into the next thing, you grab your journaling tool and write a sentence or two about the previous process. Once that’s done, then you can move on.

Again, from the piece:

Something about writing it down lets me set it down. The open loops stop circling because they’re now sitting in a note instead of in my head. By the time I get to the next task, I’m actually thinking about the next task. Not the last one.

I’ve heard David speak about interstitial journaling before, and while it sounded neat, I couldn’t quite find where it might fit in with my life. But this explanation makes it click, and it’s something I’m trying.