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

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.