What is task switching overhead?

Task switching overhead is a concept in personal epistemology: When you change contexts you must deliberately load the relevant frame of reference.

Example: A software architect spends the morning deep in a database migration plan — schema diagrams, query optimization, rollback strategies. At 11:15 she gets pulled into a product strategy meeting. She walks in physically, but her working memory is still loaded with table indices and foreign key constraints. For the first fifteen minutes, she contributes nothing. She misreads the product manager's question about user segmentation because her mind parses 'segmentation' as a database term. She nods along while her brain silently flushes one context and loads another. By the time she is cognitively present in the meeting, half of it is over. The meeting was not the problem. The instant, unprepared context switch was the problem. She never gave herself a loading protocol — a deliberate two-minute practice of closing the old context and opening the new one.

This concept is part of Phase 9 (Context Sensitivity) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for context sensitivity.