Mental Performance and the Lost Art of Transition Time

You’re likely overestimating how many quality tasks you can juggle at high level in your life. Simultaneously, you’re likely underestimating how important the transition period is from one task to another is for your success. 

From positive psychology, we know that the mind doesn’t multitask. In fact, when we think we’re multitasking, we’re actually just quickly switching from one task orientation to another, which is mostly fine if you’re doing dishes, listening to a podcast, making a grocery list, and watching your kids at the same time. 

This is not exactly the type of transition time that works, however, when the tasks are instead building a business, learning how to integrate AI into your workflow, preparing a keynote, and writing a book.

These high performance tasks require the lost art of transition time. 

I didn’t know it at the time, but the pseudo-multitasking existence I’d lived for years running the gym didn’t allow me to add “Write a book” to the list of interchangeable tasks I was switching from on a minute-to-minute basis. Subconsciously, I began doing writing sessions in a new location (Menotti’s Coffee Stop). 

At first, I thought it was because I needed great coffee to write. But, that wasn’t the key. The real key was the bike ride to the shop and the bike ride home!

It’s the transition of moving away from the headspace that rooted my mindshare into the world of strength and conditioning into a new headspace. It’s worth mentioning that the transition out of writing by riding my bike back to the gym was helpful to transition into a high performance headspace to do that task. 

When the manuscript of my book crested 280 pages I found that the 11 minute bike ride to the coffee shop wasn’t actually long enough. Soon, I’d drive up to Malibu. The 40-minute drive helped even more. Towards the end, I’d finished my book on a series of flights to Europe and back. 

While this is one example of embracing transition time, I wouldn’t be sharing it with you if I didn’t think it was universal. I find that there is correlation with the magnitude of the high performance task and the intentionality of transition time that is required. 

When you’re juggling task switching, how can you increase the duration, quality, and effectiveness of your transition time?