Today I experienced the value that periodically checkpointing progress on a task can have.

When the Thanksgiving holiday rolled around last week, I had two in-progress tasks that needed to be put on pause until after the holiday. Both of these tasks involved carefully coordinating a series of steps that needed to be done in the correct order and documented for compliance.

While working on these tasks before the break, I was careful to document every step I executed along with any important contextual nuance that it contained. At the time it seemed like a waste of time — just something that needed to be done for compliance. With the plan and its surrounding context fresh in my mind, the documentation was only slowing me down. Upon returning to work today, the Monday after the holiday, I quickly realized how valuable that “waste of time” really was.

Rather than spending all day trying to remember the what, how, and why of the tasks I performed from before the break, all I had to do today was read the ticket where I had checkpointed my progress. Just like that, I was able to pick up right where I had left off. This probably saved me a few hours today, allowing what would have otherwise been a sluggish Monday to be a productive one. The more general lesson is that a little bit of documentation can drastically reduce the cost of context switching.