This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Christopher Downard
We don’t give context switching enough credit for the chaos it causes. It feels small — answering a Slack message, hopping on a quick call, checking a PR comment — but it’s quietly eroding the effectiveness of your engineering team.
Deep work demands attention. It needs space, silence, and consistency. But most teams unknowingly design workflows that keep engineers bouncing between tasks, tools, and topics. The result? Smart people doing shallow work — slowly.
Why this matters
Each time you switch contexts, your brain has to “reload” where you left off. That might cost 15 minutes. Multiply that across a team of 8 engineers and a full workweek, and you’ve lost literal days of momentum — not to meetings, not to blockers, but to fragmentation.
Worse: teams normalize this kind of inefficiency. They think it’s a focus problem, not a system problem. Leaders misread the signals, pushing for more updates, more process, more standups — unintentionally creating more fragmentation.
From the field
A former colleague of mine — an engineering director at a high-growth startup — inherited a team struggling to ship anything meaningful. When she looked under the hood, she found no shortage of talent… just constant interruption. Engineers were being asked to work across 4+ initiatives at once, field Slack pings like tech support, and chase down unclear priorities.
Her fix? Ruthless simplification. She capped WIP to one item per dev. She instituted quiet hours. And she refused to greenlight new projects until in-flight work finished. Morale didn’t just improve — shipping velocity doubled in 2 months.
Tactical byte
Want to reduce context switching starting today? Try this:
🧠 Introduce “focus blocks” — company-wide periods (even just 2 hours a day) where meetings and Slack are paused. Give engineers a guaranteed runway to go deep.
🔄 Audit your team’s WIP. If a developer is juggling more than 2 active initiatives, you likely have a throughput problem disguised as productivity.
Open threads
- How often do you switch contexts during a normal day? Have you ever tracked it?
- What signals tell you when your team is thrashing instead of flowing?
- Are there rituals or boundaries you’ve set (or want to set) to protect deep work?
Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments 👇 or hit us up at Beyond the Commit.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Christopher Downard
Christopher Downard | Sciencx (2025-07-08T17:30:00+00:00) The Hidden Tax on Your Team: The Cost of Context Switching. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/07/08/the-hidden-tax-on-your-team-the-cost-of-context-switching/
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