Multi-tasking is bad - Again
Several of my favorite bloggers have discussed multi-tasking. Reforming Project Management, Focused Performance, and Clarke Ching often explain the dreadful impact of multi-tasking. Multi-tasking is bad for a number of reasons. All of them have been widely discussed. But I want to discuss four of them here.
One.
Starting sooner doesn’t mean you will finish sooner. Let’s say you have three people that want you to do something. To simplify this example, each thing takes three days to perform. You want to make everyone happy so you start working everything as soon as possible. You switch between them each day to continue to show progress on each thing. So your work looks like this.
ABCABCABC
You deliver "A" on day 7. "B" on day 8. And "C" on day 9. In trying to make everyone happy, you pushed A and B back and didn’t do C any favors. If you had worked on these things in sequence, your work would look like this.
AAABBBCCC
You deliver "A" on day 3. "B" on day 6. And "C" is still delivered on day 9. Starting sooner didn’t get work done sooner.
Two.
Sometimes work needs to be expedited. It just happens. In the second work flow above, you could just drop the expedited work into the queue as the next thing to do. You don’t interupt other work in progress, and you will finish it just as fast as possible. Remember, starting it as soon as possible isn’t what’s important. Finishing it as soon as possible is what’s important. Mixing expedited work into the middle of the flow will slow everyone down.
Three.
When you take longer to deliver work, you raise the risk that the customer requirements will change. You want to have the shortest amount of time from when the work starts to when the work is delivered to the customer. This will reduce the risk that the customer requirements will change on work in progress. When customer requirements change on work in process, it creates rework. Rework is extremely expensive.
Four.
Task switching is expensive. As this NY times article points out, we are not effective at getting back to productive work when we are multi-tasking. Having multiple tasks active at a time increases the likelihood of interuption.
Our work lives are probably impacted by most of these issues. Often in combination. The multiplying effects of multitasking is devastating to performance in organizations. Just fixing this problem can double the productivity of a work group. You can have the right people, the best processes, and a solid strategy. Managing the flow of work through each person in the organization has the potential to boost productivity as much as any people, process, or strategy improvement.
What can you put into place to reduce the impact of multitasking on your organization?
March 29th, 2007 at 11:51 am
I’ve had this conversation with several people hierarchically above and below me and get the same vapid stare until I clarify the difference between multi-tasking and time management. The conversation is generally an attempt to discuss the importance of appropriate prioritization. In my mind multi-tasking is not working on something else when you cannot work on the task at hand (e.g., you are waiting), or stopping to address e-mails, answer the phone, or other aspects of corporate life. That is time management.
Multi-tasking is the intentional stoppage of ongoing work to transition focus to another task area.
It has been my experience that many companies, and thus mid-level managers (where the work gets done), live in an inverted priority world: more “high” priority projects than “mid” priority projects, and more “mid” priority than those with “low” priority. This inability to prioritize then creates a need to show some (however minimal) progress across the multiple high-level projects.
The key to eliminating the perceived need to multi-task in my mind is to flip the priority world upright. Project sponsors must internally coordinate and establish a meaningful prioritization of needed work. Secondly, in a multi-team environment, systems need to be in place to ensure that each team member has only one highest priority project, and a clearly defined series of “nexts”. There should be minimal question regarding what should be worked on when I can’t work on my A project. The rest is just good time management.
April 4th, 2007 at 7:40 am
Steve,
You are right. The appropriate systems must be in place to support the prioritization of efforts. What I see a vicious cycle of expediting new high priority work fueled by long durations and unpredictable results caused by multi-tasking in the first place.
Without the appropriate systems in place to prioritize, we work on many tasks at the same time. We stay busy by switching but do not deliver results rapidly. This extends how long any one deliverable will take and makes it difficult to predict completion times.
Extensive duration length and uncertainty leads to management prioritizing “important” work into the existing work in progress, exacerbating the problems. Moving deliverables through the work stream intact reduces the time from start to finish and increases predictability.
The power of short time to delivery and predictable results is that management will queue the next most important thing, rather that expedite over work in process.
Dennis