What is the ‘switch tax’ costing you?

On a quest to find the mental costs of switching between tasks during the workday, Dr. Yiwen Jin, PhD, at the University of Calgary''s Haskayne School of Business found surprising insights in an unlikely place: operating rooms.  

For years, researchers have known that multitasking creates a kind of mental friction that slows you down. Yet most of this research had been conducted in closely controlled laboratory settings. Jin and his co-authors wondered how that mental residue shows up in real-world settings where stakes are high.  

National registry data on U.S. organ transplants provided just what the researchers needed: a long-term, natural experiment in genuine environments outside the laboratory. The researchers pored over records from 300,000 organ transplant surgeries, performed by 982 surgeons over a 13-year period.  

Since donated organs from deceased donors arrived as they became available, surgeons couldn’t predict what surgery was coming next. Some back-to-back procedures were similar, such as two kidney transplants in a row. Others required a significant mental shift when, for example, a kidney transplant was followed by a liver transplant. This randomization of surgeries allowed researchers to measure the mental costs of task switching. 

Jin and his co-authors recently published their results in a first-of-its-kind large-scale study in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. The study reveals what the researchers call the “switch tax,” the hefty toll we pay in efficiency, accuracy and safety when our brains are not given a chance to reset between tasks that require a different mindset.  

The magnitude of what they found has powerful implications. For transplant patients, the cost of their surgeon’s switch tax was a 14.8-per cent increase in one-year mortality rates relative to the average level. Unmanaged switching between different types of transplant surgeries closed the gap between experienced and novice surgeons by more than half. In other words, it erased years of accumulated skill and expertise.  

Jin notes the findings extend beyond the operating room and into board rooms, cubicles and factory floors across industries.  

"Professionals are constantly pulled between tasks," says Jin, who is an assistant professor. "Our research moves from diagnosis to prescription. We provide evidence-based parameters that leaders can use to redesign workflows.” 

Research published in Harvard Business Review estimates that workers flip back and forth between applications more than 1,200 times per day. Not only are they wasting up to nine per cent of their annual work time on task switching, but they are also contributing to systems-level risk.  

When high-stakes work requires frequent shifts between dissimilar tasks, even top performers are more vulnerable to error. According to Jin and his co-authors, experience alone is not enough to overcome the switch tax and have identified four strategies to reduce the cost:  

1. Work in batches. Instead of switching back and forth between budgets, performance conversations and creative problem solving, and design your workday to keep similar cognitive tasks grouped together.  
2. Build in recovery intervals. Give yourself time for a mental reset between different tasks.  
3. Invest in cross-training. The study found that experts who have dual expertise were able to handle transitions between tasks. According to Jin, “cross-training is not just for skill development; it is a structural defense against the switch tax."  
4. Embrace technology. Simple tech supports — such as an AI-generated briefing of a completed task, or a calendar optimized by task similarity, not time efficiency — can help reduce the cost of switching.  

You can hear Jin discussing his research on the May 5 episode of the Calgary Eyeopener.