When I was a junior engineer, one of the best advice I got from a seasoned principal engineer was to batch things, stack rank them in preferred order (by time, size, impact, or priority), and execute. And, be careful when batching them. Batching them by function increases productivity as it minimizes context switching cost.
At the time, I didn’t pay much attention to that advice because I “thought” I could multitask well. So for me, the cost of the context switch was already minimal. I don’t need to divide the task by function. I could drive a car and listen to the radio. I could clean the utensils and watch TV. And I could eat food and have a conversation.
To many of you, it’s probably evident that functions already separate the above tasks. Even though I was multitasking, the two tasks were separated by firm functional boundaries, i.e., physical and mental, and the cost of context switching is already significantly less.
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