The amount of time required to change to a different work task. It is the waste from multitasking. It is the act of turning a team member’s attention and mental focus from one task to another, rather than having them do one thing at a time until it is complete. Sequential processing gets you faster results on average, and the longer it takes to switch tasks, the bigger the waste penalty you pay for multitasking. Research backs up the assertion that context switching increases processing time and error rate. Task recovery time includes how long a worker takes to resume the task at the pace at which they left off before the interruption. Mitigation strategies include using the Pomodoro technique.^[1]