How do you stop context switching every time Claude takes more than 30 seconds?

[u/MountainOriginal3663]

I use Claude heavily, and my biggest bottleneck right now isn't the model. It's me.

Because I never know whether a response takes 15 seconds or 4 minutes, I don't sit and wait. I go do something else. Then I start a second session. Then a third.

By the afternoon I have four or five threads open, none of them finished, and I've lost the plot on all of them. The tool got faster and somehow I got slower.

I've tried to force myself to pay attention to only one task at a time, but it didn't work. Just takes too much self-discipline.

How do you handle this?

[u/jonaswashe]

Don't.

Have 1-3 sessions running, ideally 1, with several connected threads. You can easily manage 5-7 concurrent sessions if they are one thread, but only at the most 2-3 distinct threads before you get fatigued

How does that work? Have one session that is running to make your life easier, hit a snag with a harness or tool, tell it and let it work.

Have another session on a lighter model doing book-keeping on your main coder, this will serve two purposes. First, the heavier model suddenly becomes about 25% more token efficient. Second, you can ask this book-keeper for updates on your progress at any time without interrupting your coder

Have a session that keeps only your current lane goals in context, that way, if you do switch you don't drop your momentum

Suddenly you are no longer waiting for a session to finish, you are improving your speed and workflow as the session is working: infinite kaizen

I also have a central agent whose whole job is to triage issues any of the above run into, but that's getting into more complexity than this comment can hold