How good are you at single tasking?
Posted by Christophe on January 7, 2009
People believe they can multitask.
Managers want their team members to multitask.
“Give me a specific example when you had to mul-i tasks with a lot of projects” is a common recommended interview question by job interview secrets books. Google shows 300,000 results. Jobbankusa.com gives the expected answer “Answer Guide: Applicant should have the ability to problem solve, handle competing priorities, be able to multi-task and have the ability to effectively process and re-organize planning structures to ensure a successful conclusion.“
Jeff Atwood at codinghorror.com gives a whole different perspective in his article “The Multi-Tasking Myth“: you lose 20% of your time for each additional task done in parallel.
A recent study from Danish researchers proved that even for something as automated as walking we have to actually think just to stay upright. This significantly prevented septuagenarians from doing simple math while walking.
The metaphor of juggling is frequently used to represent the idea of multi-tasking. This is ironical, since jugglers do one task only: rotating balls in the air.
With pressure for getting more stuff done and constant harassment from the environment (emails, IMs, phone calls), multi-tasking is eating organization productivity alive.
Put your phone on DND, shut down outlook, close your messenger. Pick one project – a small one, very small one – and get it done.
And next time you interview someone, ask them “how good are you at single tasking?”
abby, the hacker chick blog said
haha, great post! Alan Shalloway was just discussing this in his Lean online training course yesterday as well. In addition to agreeing with everything you have here, he also discusses that one of Lean’s principles is eliminating waste.
Whenever you have a work in progress (which, of course, you wind up with lots of WIPs when you multi-task) you’re creating waste. In the world of physical manufacturing the problems of WIPs are perhaps more obvious – the added cost of inventory/storage and the risk that if a product line changes/stops production, all that WIP is just throw away. But, he says, in software development the costs and risks associated with having all these outstanding WIPs are even worse. Knowledge degrades quickly, requirements get out of date, the feedback loop is delayed so we don’t learn what we’re doing wrong. Not to mention all that half-done/probably untested code intermingled with our production code – some of which we never get a chance to get back to, so it’s just degrading our product.
Next time I go on an interview, I think I’ll prefer the company that asks YOUR question.
Jesse Fewell » Managing Life Using “Personal Scrum” said
[...] *is a hard thing to do*. You can see the deeper truth of this by reading these posts about the difficulty of single-tasking. Without a team or coach around me, I’m left to follow my own distractions. My daily huddle [...]