Identify Your “Working Spheres” and Increase Productivity
Working within your working spheres reduces your mental task switching increasing concentration and productivity
Working spheres are activities that are thematically related. They have many components to them, including:
- the environment,
- our active engagement,
- the part (subdivision) of the whole project,
- and the specific area (subject) we are focusing our attention and energy on.
- our objectives
- other people involved
- our motivations
We can think of two general spheres as "work" and "non-work," but we can also dive further into each. You might have a family/home sphere and a friends or social sphere within your non-work sphere, for example. There could even be a sphere for the activities or hobbies you are involved in. Your work sphere would include your coworker relationship sphere, as well as different spheres for the projects you are involved in.
For the sake of this article, I want to focus on our work sphere and how you might use the idea of working in spheres to increase productivity.
When designing your systems or routines, keep in mind that people have different working spheres in which they alternate between having various stages of awareness of them (due to task switching), a local and global view of the context surrounding the task or project, and managing transitions between different spheres.
When we are constantly switching between spheres, we slow down and are more prone to making mistakes. When we transfer from task A to task B, we always have some attention left on task A, so if we can complete our work inside a particular sphere, we can increase our output and quality of work.
Research has found that on average people engage in task switching/multitasking every 11 minutes. However, if we use the concept of working within a working sphere, we reduce task switching down to every 3 minutes.
The reason this happens is because when we leave behind residual attention on task A, we cannot fully focus on task B. This results in us spending too much time reviewing task B to figure out where we left off and what to do next.
Switching tasks can also take 20 minutes or longer to get into a flow state. A flow state is that desirable state where we are fully immersed in a task and time passes without our notice. It has been described as a state of effortless effort due to the fact that the next steps just happen; we know exactly what to say and do.
Think about routines that keep us within a working sphere when we are setting up systems and routines to follow, so we are not constantly mentally switching areas of focus and causing disruptions in our thinking processes.
How do we set up our Working Spheres?
- Go from broad to focused. Get as specific as you can. Some spheres will overlap, for instance, some work projects may involve some of the same coworkers, but not others, or there may be an overlap in the subject, or objectives.
- Routines you engage in can be spheres in themselves as they are logically ordered tasks you are completing.
- Schedule times to focus your attention on specific spheres. For example, when I am writing an article this would be one project sphere and I sit at the computer to write. I sit down to write, basically, at the same time every day. I work within my writing sphere.
- Identify the different components within a sphere. For example, within my writing sphere, there is the environment & tools: at my table, in front of the computer; the objective: research, write, edit, and publish an article; the subject: this will vary per article; the motivation: to learn, ideate, and to share my ideas in an easy-to-understand way.
First, I research. And when I research, I just research. Then, when I write, I just write, and so on for each component. All of these tasks (research, write, edit, and publish) are within the writing sphere, but this is a subset sphere of writing an article, the article sphere. I could also have a book sphere within my larger writing sphere.
- Working spheres are systematically and logically arranged in a way that makes sense to you and minimizes leaving the sphere and scope you are in. Run through the tasks in your way and try to work until you are completed, or at least at a natural stopping point.
- Cluster work in similar spheres together so you can reduce mental task switching, which is what causes the brain to work harder and expend unnecessary mental energy.
- You can cluster spheres that overlap together as well. If spheres overlap and need the same coworkers to get them done, organize a time to get together and complete both spheres together.
Final Thoughts
Identifying and working within similar working spheres at predetermined times boosts our productivity because we spend less time catching up on tasks (because we are already in that mind space) and can maintain concentration on those similar tasks (because we waste less mental energy on task switching).
Next Read: Estimate the time needed to complete your tasks
Or: Timeboxing technique to plan your days
Follow me for more on productivity, habits, personal development, flow, writing, and mindset. And on Twitter @mj_jens0
Follow my Substack newsletter!
