Reducing the Pain of Context-Switching 🔀

Context switching is a huge pain as both a dev & dev advocate and makes it hard to be creative!

Three things that help:

📥 Centralize your capture
🤔 Review regularly
🤖 Automate where you can

Let's dig into each of these!

📥 Centralize your capture

"Cognitive setup" is the big drain of context-switching. Try @fortelabs' "slow burns 🔥 vs heavy lifts 🏋️‍♂️".

Trade 1 big block of cognitive setup + creative work for short sessions that keep the project context fresh. More: https://t.co/BW0XjTudAi
First "slow burn" strategy: centralize where you capture ideas, take notes, & track project status. You might gather:

- Links to relevant docs or websites
- Ideas
- Notes or caveats
- Dated status updates

You can put these in physical journals, 1 app, or multiple apps.
For me, no 1 app can do everything so I use:

- @NotionHQ for status updates
- @draftsapp for jotting down ideas/notes to categorize later (not having to think about where to put an idea as you're having it is 💯)
- @obsdmd for archives/notes/research ("knowledge management")
You can go really deep into knowledge management; just google "Zettelkasten" and you'll see what I mean. If you want to check out Obsidian for yourself, here's a great intro tutorial: https://t.co/sl7AVEAYvF
🤔 Review regularly

The most overlooked & underrated thing that helps with context-switching is reviewing projects & notes regularly. It:

- Helps us notice patterns
- Clears the junk from our heads
- Helps us understand our true capacity

More: https://t.co/9vE7lgVQyk
I review my projects in Notion about once a week & add comments about the last thing I was working on & my next action.

I do some "digital gardening" in Drafts & Obsidian each day; I'll review my Drafts inbox & move to Obsidian or clean up my notes on whatever I'm working on.
🤖 Automate where you can

Automation can be a rabbit hole, but the place to prioritize is reducing your likelihood of getting distracted. Like when you head to Chrome to Google something & then come to your senses an hour later while deep in the @dog_rates timeline 🐕.
Take advantage of all the ways technology can help you, whether shell scripts or tools like @zapier & @integromat. I rely on @keyboardmaestro & @TextExpander to insert snippets, launch collections of apps, etc. Here's how I use KM w/screencasting: https://t.co/ZUfhQx9Brq
I also learned a trick from @MacSparky on how to use KM to create "context palettes" of shortcuts. I hit "ctrl-cmd-opt-B" to bring up a bunch of business shortcuts to launch sites, open repos in @code, or open a Notion project. Here's how to do it: https://t.co/nGbvHMVIL8
Start slow with automation; notice where you're getting distracted & gradually build automations that save you steps.

It's easy to over-engineer something complicated & then ditch the whole thing out of frustration.

To really nerd out on this, check out @automatorsfm 🤓
I've found this combo of centralizing capture, regular review, & automation to be extremely powerful even when I only get it right 70% of the time. The slow burn 🔥 significantly reduces the amount of time I need to get creative work done.
If you found this helpful, you'd probably also like my Developer Microskills newsletter! Each week, I send out a practical, actionable way to improve as a dev & dev advocate. Last week's issue was an expanded version of this thread!

Join 1090+ other devs: https://t.co/V2TzZmX1F5

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2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


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For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)