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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of IHart Radio. Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's tip is to free up time for meaningful work by reducing

the time you spend switching between tasks. Today's tip comes from an article in the Harvard

Business Review about what the authors call the toggling tax, that is, the time and energy that goes to switching between applications.

You probably know what I mean.

You're in PowerPoint and realize you need to look up a statistic, so you go to the web.

Your homepage is the New York Times, so you quickly scan the latest headlines before searching for the data you need.

A few minutes later, you're back in PowerPoint, working on your presentation, when you get a team's chat notification.

You switch over and quickly reply to the message.

Then, while you are already interrupted, you figure you might as well

pop into email to see if there is anything urgent. Finally, you make it back to PowerPoint. In just a few

minutes, you have been in PowerPoint, the New York Times, wherever you got the data you needed,

PowerPoint again, then Teams, then email, then back to PowerPoint.

And you probably repeat this sort of sequence dozens of times per day.

The authors of the articles say this context switching takes a toll.

For starters, it can increase stress, but beyond that, every switch takes some

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