Five years ago we wrote about the cost of context switching. The advice still holds. What changed is the number of places your attention can go. In 2021 a working browser held email, a chat app, a doc and a task board. In 2026 it holds all of those plus ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and whichever assistant your company bought a seat for last quarter.
AI was meant to take work off your plate. In practice it added a new category of tab, and a new kind of hop: ask the model, copy the answer, paste it somewhere, check Slack while you wait, come back to ask a follow-up, forget which chat the follow-up belonged in. Every one of those hops is a context switch, and they add up faster than the time the model saved you.
The new shape of a workday
Here's a fairly typical half hour. You open a Claude chat to draft an email. While it writes, you glance at Gmail. There's a question from a client, so you open the client's Notion page to check a date. Notion links to a Figma file. Back in Gmail you reply, then remember the draft. Which tab was it in? You open a new chat instead, re-explain the context, and now you have two half-finished conversations about the same email.
None of that is unusual. Chat-based tools invite it, because a conversation feels like something you should keep open "in case". By lunchtime there are eleven AI tabs, and the one you need isn't the one you can find.
Why it costs more than it looks
Researchers call the lingering pull of the last task "attention residue". When you jump from one thing to another, part of your mind stays on the first thing for several minutes. Each switch is small on its own. Forty of them in a morning is most of the morning.
AI chats make the residue worse, because each one is a thread you only half remember. You can't glance at a tab titled "Email draft help" and know what state it's in. You have to open it, read it, and reload the context into your head before you can continue. That reload is the real cost, and it's paid every time.
Five fixes that work
1. Give every project its own Space
The simplest fix is to stop treating the browser as one big pile. In Switch, a Space is a named set of tabs: one per client, project or context. Put the project's AI chats in the same Space as its docs, its board and its inbox filter. When you switch Spaces, every tab reopens where you left it, including the chat you were mid-way through. The "which tab was it" question goes away because the answer is "the one in this Space".
2. Stop opening a new chat for every question
Most duplicate chats start because the assistant wasn't in reach. Pin the assistants you use daily as Favourites in the Switch dock. One click from any page opens the app, and you land in the chat you already have rather than a fresh one. Open all your Favourites together at the start of the day and the whole setup is ready before the coffee is.
3. Let search find the chat
Chat titles are generated by the model and they all sound alike. Power Search looks across every open tab, your Favourites and your browsing history from the keyboard, so you can type "pricing page" and get the chat where you discussed the pricing page, even if it was closed yesterday.
4. Protect a block of time
Some switches have nothing to do with tools. They're habit. Focus pauses the sites that pull you away for as long as you choose. With Pro it runs on a schedule, each site can keep its own hours, and strict mode stops you ending early when you're tempted. Nobody is blocking the internet here. The idea is that the next distraction takes a deliberate decision, where before it took a reflex.
5. Step back the way you came
When you do need to retrace your steps, Tab Flow walks back through your recent tabs in the order you actually used them, rather than the order they sit in the tab strip. The email, the Notion page, the chat, in that sequence, one shortcut per step.
Measure it
Switch keeps a running Time Saved count on your device: quicker tab switches, tabs you didn't have to hunt for, time Focus kept for you. It's an estimate, but once you can see the number you tend to do something about it.
Rearrange the room
The assistants are fine. The trouble is that each one arrived as another tab in a browser that was already full, and nobody rearranged the room. Give each project a Space, keep the assistants one click away, and let search do the remembering. Install Switch for free and see how much of your day was going to the hops between tools.