interest, not a toll
Every model of context switching I’ve read charges a toll. You switch, you pay: a few hundred milliseconds in the lab, some number of minutes in the office, and then you’re through the gate and working again. The cost is per switch. Fewer switches, lower cost.
That model is fine for a person with one job and a phone that rings. It’s wrong for a person with six organizations, because it prices the switch and ignores the absence.
In 2020 I wrote a one-line post: being away from a project costs more the longer you are away from it. Mind bit-rot. I’ve since decided the second sentence is the whole theory.
The context you hold on any organization isn’t a fixed object you set down and pick up. It decays while you’re gone. The customer’s environment changed and nobody told you. A thread moved on without you. The thing you were about to try, you now have to re-derive, and the re-derivation isn’t free because you’ve also forgotten what you already ruled out. Two days away is a small bill. Two weeks is a re-onboarding. Two months and you’re a new hire with your own name on the old commits.
The cost is interest, not a toll. It accrues continuously, on every context you’re not currently in, at a rate set by how fast that world moves and how little of it you wrote down.
That changes what to optimize. A toll model says: batch your switches, protect your blocks, go dark. An interest model says the contexts you aren’t in are the ones costing you, right now, whether or not you touch them today. The fix isn’t fewer switches. It’s a lower rate, and the rate is set by how much of the state lives outside your head.
Toll thinking produced the Pomodoro timer. Interest thinking produces a ledger.
Every organization you belong to is a loan you’re servicing. Write the balance down before you walk away from it.