Spend a day toiling as a knowledge worker, and you can leave the office feeling mentally fried. You may not have been that busy, nor done work that was even that cognitively challenging, and yet your brain still feels positively blitzed.
The reason for this cognitive fatigue often isn’t the nature of the work itself. Instead, it’s all the switching it involves.
We’re constantly toggling between different devices, apps, tabs, tasks, and responsibilities. While each jump seems small, together they generate what psychologists call a switching cost — the hidden toll your brain pays every time it shifts gears. When you change focus, your mind must unload one context and load another: new goals, new cues, new rules of engagement. That reorientation burns mental fuel. Do it hundreds of times a day, and you end up depleted; the issue isn’t the amount of work you did, but how often you had to start over.
Paul Leonardi, a professor of technology management and the author of Digital Exhaustion, calls switching a new hidden tax of modern life, and it can have an effect not only on your productivity and the quality of your work, but on the quality of your life outside the office, too; if you’re coming home each day feeling like your mind’s been in a blender, you’re not going to have the mojo to go out with friends, read books, exercise, and pursue hobbies — the stuff that really leads to a flourishing life.
To mitigate this hidden but significant cost, let’s dive into exactly what this switching looks like, why it wears you down, and what you can do about it.
The 3 Kinds of Switching
Leonardi identifies three kinds of switching that drain our mental energy:
1. Mode Switching — Changing How You Think
Mode switching happens whenever you shift between different cognitive gears. You’re changing your mental frame — from reflective to reactive, from creative to administrative, from detail-oriented to big-picture.
Maybe you’re writing a strategic report (deep, generative thinking) when a Slack message pops up. You reply (fast, reactive thinking), then return to the presentation. Or you’re analyzing a dataset (analytical mode) and then switch to coaching a coworker (empathetic, social mode).
These brief detours feel harmless, but your brain just had to unload one mental model and load another. Then when you switch back to the previous task, you have to again change out your cognitive lens. That takes ample mental effort.
2. Tool Switching — Changing Where You Think
Tool switching happens when you shift between platforms, systems, or interfaces. Modern work often takes place on both phones and laptops and across a dozen apps — email, Asana, Google Docs, text messages, Zoom, and on and on. Within a span of a few minutes, you may be moving between your inbox, ChatGPT, and Slack (with a quick stopover to Instagram).
Each medium has its own rhythms, layouts, shortcuts, and even social expectations; each has its own digital context. Moving between them requires mental translation. You have to remember which keyboard commands work here, which login you’re using there, what tone to strike in this other chat. Your brain must constantly reorient to different micro-environments.
Leonardi’s research shows that even “simple” tool switching can compound quickly. The average worker toggles between applications nearly 1,200 times a day! This keeps your mind in a perpetual state of fragmentation and partial engagement. You’re everywhere at once, but nowhere fully.
3. Role Switching — Changing Who You Are
Role switching happens when you move between identities. Each day you wear multiple hats — boss, teammate, parent, friend, customer, coach — and you repeatedly have to take one off and put one on. In a single hour, you might be leading a team meeting, interfacing with a plumber, and texting your wife about who’s picking up what kid.
Each role carries its own emotional tone and expectations. Each demands a different voice, vocabulary, and demeanor. Significant shifts in roles used to be buffered by space and time — you were in employee mode at the office, had some liminal downtime on your commute, and then stepped into dad mode when you got home. Today, the switches happen instantaneously, in the same chair, on the same screen. Without boundaries, the different emotions from different roles bleed into each other, and having to try to stem that bleed and compartmentalize your mindset around each role tuckers you out.
Why Switching Exhausts You
You may have noticed that while each form of switching can happen independently, they often overlap; we frequently switch between modes, tools, and roles at the same time. This only compounds their frazzling effect.
Whether engaged in separately or together, all three forms of switching draw on the same limited resource: executive control — the part of your brain that keeps priorities straight, suppresses impulses, and directs attention. When that system gets overloaded, you experience fatigue, indecision, and irritability.
You don’t just run out of energy; you run out of coherence. You start to feel scattered because, in a real sense, you are. Your attention has been shredded by a thousand tiny transitions.
How to Cut Down on Switching Fatigue
You can’t eliminate switching altogether — modern life requires it — but you can manage it. The solutions are simple, though of course harder to implement and consistently stick with:
1. Batch Similar Work
Group tasks that use the same mode of thinking. Answer emails once in the morning and once in the afternoon instead of all day long. Make calls back-to-back. Do creative work in uninterrupted blocks. Do a no-switching sprint where you commit to working on one task for something like 20 minutes with zero toggling to anything else. The goal is to stay in one cognitive gear long enough to find rhythm.
2. Minimize Tool Jumps
Audit your digital environment. How many apps do you actually need? Consolidate where you can. Keep your phone out of reach while working on your computer. Disable nonessential notifications so you’re not jerked between platforms.
If you can’t control the number of tools, control how you use them: dedicate windows of time to each rather than hopping constantly.
3. Use Microtransitions to Shift Between Roles
Re-build boundaries between your identities by creating microtransitions that can help you more smoothly segue between your different roles. After work, and before you go home, take a short walk or meditate in the driveway for a few minutes. If you work from home, go to the gym at the end of your work day or change your clothes before you shift into leisure time. Rituals help your mind switch cleanly rather than carry the residue of one role into the next.
Embrace Single-Thread Living
If everyone seems tired and burnt out these days, it’s often not because we’re trying to do too much, but how frequently we’re changing what we’re doing.
Every switch carries a cost. Our focus gets fragmented, our attention is pulled in too many directions, and we never fully inhabit our current context. We end up mentally blitzed and do everything in a mediocre way.
Doing our best work, and having enough surplus mental fuel to fill our lives with more than work, requires choosing fewer contexts at a time — less frenetic switching and more steady investing. It requires staying put mentally long enough for depth to form, remembering that it’s only in the deeps that the good stuff happens.
