[jsilence]

I have a similar situation, managing a lot of different threads in very different contexts (teaching and projects) at our university.

I miss the state of flow very much, not being able to focus on one thing and diving deep for a couple of hours or even a couple of days. The constant context switch and firehosing of incoming messages I have to fend off is draining.

Just as you say, some days feel like having been completely busy while not achieving anything of substance. I know I am lubricating others work, but I'd love to be with my own toughts for a while also.

For the next project I am attempting to dedicate full and exclusive days to the different contexts, so that at least on that single day my mind is not concerned with all the contexts, threads and their TODOs.

I am already tagging my incoming emails with "TODO" and "waiting for reply" and sorting them into their respective folders and then afterwards heading for the tag stacks and working on them. I think I will add tags for contexts and set up filters, so that I can open the right TODO stack for the topic of the day I am working on, to conceal any "not today" work.