“Context switching is stealing your joy”
I almost missed the best story of the week.
Last Wednesday night, I sat in a room full of men who were supposed to be broken.
Instead, one of them stood up and told us his wife had taken him back. Thirty years of marriage — nearly destroyed by alcohol, nearly lost for good — restored. Another man described the night he almost didn’t make it home at all. He was smiling when he said it.
I almost missed it the story of a man restored back to life and his wife of thirty years.
Not because I wasn’t in the room. I was. But my brain was somewhere else — somewhere between the next project due Friday, the fall campaign email I hadn’t finished, and the donor who’d left a voicemail I still hadn’t returned. Physically present. Mentally fractured.
That’s not multitasking. That’s context switching. And it’s one of the biggest joy stealers in ministry.
I Started as a Chaplain
I came into this work through the front door — sitting with men in crisis, walking with them through recovery. I became a program director, then an executive director of a staff of five.
We grew. Five staff became thirty-five. In a town of 90,000 people, we were serving nearly 1,000 men each year. The mission was working.
And then the budget started staring me in the eyes.
Payroll. Capital needs. Facility costs. Grant deadlines. The financial engine that made all the program work possible suddenly needed someone to run it — and that someone was me. The shift wasn’t gradual. It was abrupt. One season, I was living inside the programming. Next, I was scrambling to raise the funds.
I know I’m not the only one. Many of us entered nonprofit leadership through the work itself — as chaplains, counselors, program directors, and community organizers. We were good at the mission. Then the mission grew, and the job description quietly changed beneath us.
The Enemy Disguised as Productivity
For years, I called it multitasking. I thought it was normal — running from a staff meeting to a donor call to a grant application to my inbox, all in the same afternoon.
Now I know what it actually was: context switching. I have learned it is controllable. I just needed some rules and guard rails.
The research is detailed — every time your brain shifts from one task to another, it pays a toll. You’re not doing two things at once. You’re doing two things badly, one after the other, with diminished capacity each time.
But the deeper cost isn’t cognitive. Its presence.
When you’re bouncing all day from program prep to grant writing to donor email to opening mail, you arrive at the end of the day having touched everything and finished nothing. Worse, you can end up sitting in a room where a man’s marriage is being restored and miss it entirely because your mind is still three tasks behind.
The work of preparing for impact could crowd out the experience of witnessing it.
What Wednesday Night Reminded Me
The celebration service exists for one reason: to stop and name what is actually happening. Men who were once homeless, addicted, estranged from their families — standing up and saying this is what eighteen months looks like. This is what rescue looks like.
A thirty-year marriage restored causes tears and a deep appreciation for God and his grace. The impact is hard to write well in the impact section of a grant proposal. But it is exactly why the grants exist. It is exactly why the payroll matters. It is the whole point.
And I was in the room when it was announced — halfway thinking about the next thing I had to do.
"Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken from her."
— Luke 10:41–42
What I’ve Learned to Do Instead
I am not perfect at this. But managing demands on my calendar has been the key — not working harder or faster, but working in a way that matches how the brain actually functions.
I have created guard rails on my time to give me margin:
Stack similar tasks together. Answer email in bursts rather than reacting to every notification. When you batch similar work, you stay in one mental mode longer and spend less energy on the switching cost.
Find or Protect two to three-hour blocks for big work. Grant writing, strategic planning, and major donor correspondence — these need sustained focus. Treat those blocks like appointments. Look at your schedul regularly to see if you can move meetings to find a two hour block to write and do focus-thinking tasks.
Keep meetings to three days out of five. Meeting-heavy weeks fragment everything else. Two protected, meeting-free days change what actually gets done. This is hard but a great goal. If you can, protect either the morning or afternoon. Don’t let people fragment these days.
Put witnessing time on the calendar. Program visits. Celebration services. Client testimonies. If they’re not scheduled, they get crowded out by whatever is loudest that week.
None of this eliminates the demands. The grants still come due. The fall campaign still happens. The donor email still needs a reply. But there’s a difference between being driven by the calendar and being buried by it.
The Joy Is Still in the Room
The man who stood up Wednesday night and talked about his marriage — that’s why I work in a Christian nonprofit. That’s why the mission grew. That’s why the budget matters.
The joy was never in the multitasking. It was always in the room. We have to be present enough to receive it.
Have you experienced the shift from doing the work to funding the work? How do you stay connected to why it matters? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
If this resonated with you, Bold Leading exists to help nonprofit leaders stay grounded in their mission while building the organizational capacity to sustain it. Whether you’re navigating the jump from practitioner to executive or just trying to reclaim your calendar, there’s more at boldleading.com.