Within tech and design at least, it’s fairly typical that the more senior you are, the more ways you can contribute — the more projects or initiatives you need to be aware of and swap between. This context-switching I feel most if not all of us struggle with at times. It’s a proven drain on time and has the propensity to introduce mistakes.

Over the last few years, as I’ve been fortunate to be in a more senior position, I’ve tried a few ways to help myself get better with doing this, change how I think about what I do.

As human beings, we have enough of a shared language to understand really quite complex ideas but it’s still fundamentally impossible to understand another’s experience or thought processes, no matter how empathetic we might be. Talking about ways of working or how to articulate how we think is problematic. I consider myself to be a visual thinker but obviously have no idea whether that’s how everyone thinks or not — my impression is that some people might not identify with that description.

Initially, I struggled with context switching as a developer, being assigned a set of tasks in a sprint but also helping others with their tasks and getting involved in planning what else was coming down the pipeline…as well as the cognitive load once I assumed the responsibility of others as a manager. The mental hurdle here for me was that all of these tasks were somehow different. Changing between them meaning somehow having to get into the minutiae immediately and so hurriedly parking the state your head was currently in.

It feels like over time; I may’ve found a way that doesn’t make this feel problematic but actually beneficial. Here’s some things I use to try and change the way I think to better context switch. Maybe some of this is of use to someone else. As with a lot of things, your mileage may vary!

Conceptual Models

For those not familiar with the term ‘mental model’, it’s often used in UX as a way of referring to a representation people might have of something external to themselves: how to find your way around a building to the hierarchy of the company you work for to what music you’re into and how to program your VCR (old-school reference in there).

For want of a better phrase, I group a bunch of these mental models of a workplace or project along with some more philosophical stuff around what the place is and how it presents itself as kind of ‘conceptual model’. There’s the factual stuff such as what the company or organisation is (one of many mental models) but this captures the less tangible things: What’s the point of it? What are the people running it trying to accomplish? How do the customers or audience feel about the company? What are the internal dynamics like? What’s the sense of direction? These kinds of questions can border more philosophical lines of enquiry but lean towards the macro or higher-level view.

I like to use this to ask questions like ‘What is Auto Trader?’ and strip away some of the initial responses like being ‘biggest UK automotive marketplace’ or whatever terms we might express externally to dig a little deeper. How does this help? I noticed that there’s less anxiety around any switching because you have a greater understanding that everything is connected.

Macro and Micro Views

When I was much younger, I remember going to the Bradford Science and Media Museum, which had one of the few IMAX screens in the country at that point. It was mainly shorter films based around showcasing the technology than features that were shown. There’s one that stuck with me in particular: It started with a couple laying on a blanket in a park on a summer’s day. The camera pulled slowly out, showing them getting further away, revealing the whole of Earth and going further still, past the outside of our solar system, our galaxy to some imagined visualisation of how tiny a spec all of that is within the context of what we understand the universe to be. It then zoomed back in to the couple but this time down to a microscopic level, through the skin, into an individual blood cell down to a visualisation of the nucleus of a cell. That stayed with me because of the scale it so easily showed: we are both an insignificant spec in a vast universe as well as a collection of billions of cells which form a being that is conscious and self-aware.

Taking the vaguest element of that, the work that we do has this sense of scale, from the micro (a very specific task) through to the macro (the higher-level view). It’s not always easy just doing that…going from a design or a piece of code you’re very close to and going out to its broader context; goals it’ll meet and impact it will have, let alone doing this across very different pieces of work. It’s this which is a real art-form. One of the ways I found to combat this is to understand that really, these aren’t disparate tasks but part of a larger whole.

Conceptually, you have this almost philosophical layer, but the real content of that model is composed of multiple mental models. The mental model of the hierarchy of the business perhaps…how the code is released…how a team works. Ultimately, these are parts of a whole.

Visualisations

When I’ve grown my Auto Trader conceptual model, I started on paper as a mind-map. It was a useful tool to help learn the business. Quite consciously though, I use a visualisation in my mind which is analogous to a molecular model; many nodes inter-connected with different weighting, like this example of a caffeine molecule…


The facets of a mental model more tangibly linked through context. Much of this is a formalisation of things we do innately: we naturally contextualise information. You might get chatting to someone, aware that you’ve met before and so can choose or involuntarily retrieve bits of knowledge to contextualise your experience. Much of this visualisation is like an evolution of the original mind-map I started with but now with a sense of depth and connectedness.


Landmarking

I found creating landmarks is a really useful tool within navigating a conceptual model. Initially, moving between different projects or conversations was really jarring and actually quite stress-inducing. In the sense of deliberately creating a landmark or a ‘hook’ to hang context on…much like visiting a new town and noticing a particular place, seeing that again might help you remember your way round.

In creating an artificial landmark in the wider conceptual model, it makes regaining context a lot easier. I find that recalling conversations and being able to adapt to a different mindset easier as my previous though processes aren’t completely lost as I’d felt they were before.

Sometimes this can be around a person. You might have an association with them and a certain project so they become the landmark for that, which may well be a fairly common thing for many of us. Maybe there’s a meeting room you always go to around planning and naturally when you’re there in that context, it will act as a landmark. You can take this further though — choosing something less obvious to associate this context, this collection of mental models and memories. It can take more work, but this ‘key’ can be a useful tool in quickly reminding yourself of these things very quickly. An object, a phrase…all of these things can be hooks for recall. Consider this a workplace application of the Loci Technique.

Some of this is about making some of these processes we do anyway a more deliberate act. You can turn the rough visualisation around in your mind (the appearance of it physically being turned if that’s how your mind works) and feel that all of these things are related and essentially part of a bigger whole, alleviating some of the stress I encountered before. Along with this is the confidence that comes with knowing you don’t need to know everything inside out all of the time. Knowing enough to contribute in a meaningful way is a great start but maintaining a mindset which always allows for your models to be challenged and altered is really healthy. Change and adaptability is the core of what we are.