Not all interruptions are created equal
Horizontal vs vertical context switching
Have you ever watched this famous talk Focus (or Stop Starting, Start Finishing) by Henrik Kniberg where Henrik tries to teach us that context switching is killing your throughput.
Every time you jump between tasks, you pay a tax. You lose your place, your focus, and a surprising amount of time just reloading the mental state you had before.
Most of us know this intuitively. And yet, most of us still do it all day long.
AI made it worse
The rise of AI-assisted work has, paradoxically, made context switching harder to manage.
On paper, AI makes us faster. You can spin up a draft, generate a test, review a PR, or summarize a meeting in seconds. But that speed is deceptive.
Because work is cheaper to start, we start more of it. We run multiple agents, multiple branches, multiple tabs, and multiple half-finished drafts in parallel. We’ve traded one deep focus thread for five shallow ones.
The result: more starts, fewer finishes, and a lot more context switching hidden under the illusion of productivity.
Two kinds of context switch
Here’s something that doesn’t get talked about enough: not all context switches are the same.
There are two distinct flavors, and they cost you very differently.
Horizontal context switch
A horizontal context switch is when you move between tasks of the same type.
You’re programming feature A, and then you switch to programming feature B. The work is different, but the mode you’re in isn’t. You’re still writing code. You’re still thinking in terms of functions, tests, and edge cases. Your brain doesn’t need to shift gears, it just needs to reorient within the same gear.
It still costs something. You have to reload the domain, the file structure, the naming conventions. But the cognitive machinery underneath stays the same.
Vertical context switch
A vertical context switch is when you move between different types of work.
This is the bread and butter of engineering management. One hour you’re debugging a production issue with an engineer. The next, you’re in a 1:1 navigating someone’s career anxiety. Then you’re in a roadmap discussion with product. Then you’re reviewing a design doc. Then back to a performance conversation.
Each of these requires a different mode of thinking: analytical, empathetic, strategic, critical, supportive. And every time you switch modes, you’re not just reloading context, you’re reconfiguring your entire brain.
That’s expensive. Much more expensive than most of us realize.
Vertical is worse than horizontal
If horizontal context switching is a tax, vertical context switching is a penalty.
When you flip between coding and people management, you’re not just losing the state of the previous task, you’re losing the shape of your attention. You need time to come down from a tense conversation before you can think clearly about a system design. You need time to warm up to a 1:1 if you’ve been heads down in code for two hours.
Most people underestimate this warm-up and cool-down cost. They schedule a 1:1 between two coding blocks and wonder why neither the conversation nor the code felt great. They jump from a strategy review to a bug hunt and notice they’re irritable, scattered, or just slower than usual.
It’s not a lack of discipline. It’s the nature of vertical switching.
Minimize vertical, tolerate horizontal
You can’t eliminate context switching entirely. But you can be deliberate about which kind you absorb.
The goal isn’t zero switching. The goal is to keep most of your switches horizontal, and to cluster the vertical ones so you only pay the penalty a few times a day instead of constantly.
Here are two practical ways to do that.
Time blocks
Group similar work into dedicated blocks on your calendar.
Put all your 1:1s back-to-back instead of sprinkling them across the day. Stack your deep work in a single uninterrupted chunk. Batch your code reviews. Batch your Slack and email triage.
The mechanic is simple: once you’re in a mode, stay in it as long as you reasonably can. Every hour you spend in the same mode is an hour you’re not paying the vertical switching penalty.
Themed days
For larger rhythms, consider assigning types of work to specific days.
Some managers keep Mondays for planning and strategy, Tuesdays and Thursdays for people work, and Wednesdays and Fridays for deep or technical work. The exact split doesn’t matter. What matters is that when you sit down on a given day, your brain already knows what mode it’s in.
Themed days don’t have to be rigid. Emergencies happen, and a good day plan survives contact with reality. But having a default theme means that when nothing is on fire, you naturally drift toward fewer vertical switches and more sustained focus.
Delegate to reduce switch count
Calendar tricks help you absorb switches more gracefully, but the bigger lever is making fewer of them in the first place. Every recurring thing you delegate is a vertical switch you no longer have to make. The status update you used to write, the triage rotation you used to own, the stakeholder sync you used to attend, each one was pulling you into a different mode, and now it isn’t.
This is often more powerful than any time block or themed day. A calendar trick reshapes the cost of switching. Delegation removes the switch entirely. When you look at your week and see too many vertical transitions, the first question shouldn’t be “how do I rearrange these?” but “which of these does someone else own now?”
Office hours
Ad-hoc questions are one of the biggest sources of unplanned vertical switches. A Slack DM at 10:47 might take two minutes to answer, but it pulls you out of whatever mode you were in and charges you the full switching cost on the way back. Do that five times a day and your deep work is gone, even though your calendar looks clear.
Office hours turn N interruptions into one batched block. Pick a recurring slot, tell your team that’s when you’re available for anything that isn’t urgent, and hold the line the rest of the time. Most questions that feel urgent in the moment can comfortably wait a few hours, and the ones that truly can’t will still find you. What you get in return is a predictable container for a whole category of vertical switching, instead of it leaking into every hour of the day.
Physical separation
If your setup allows it, let your environment do some of the switching work for you. One pattern that works well: do people work at the office and IC work from home. The office is where you have 1:1s, meetings, hallway conversations, and coffee chats. Home is where you write, code, review, and think.
The point isn’t the specific split, it’s that your brain uses location as a cue. Walking into a different space is a much stronger mode signal than closing one tab and opening another. You stop trying to squeeze a deep work block between two meetings in the same room, and you stop trying to be warm and present in a 1:1 from the same desk where you were just debugging. The commute, however short, becomes the buffer that your calendar was never going to give you.
Conclusion
Context switching will always be part of the job, especially as an engineering manager, and especially in a world where AI lets you juggle more threads than ever.
But not all switches are equal. Horizontal switches are the cost of doing business. Vertical switches are where the real damage happens.
So be honest with your calendar. Look at a typical day and count how many times you’re asking your brain to change shape. Then do what you can to bring that number down.
Stop starting. Start finishing. And when you do have to switch, try to switch sideways, not up and down.