Multitasking
Last week the Bay APLN had a great meeting where Chris Sims offered some of his agile learning games. The games offered the opportunity to feel and illustrate what has long been published (and is still thoroughly ignored by a large chunk of managers and workers). The first game we played was to illustrate the effects of multitasking. I have come to realise two things at the end of the game.
First what we call multitasking really is an interruption driven work process. That process is a consequence of our overall work organisation. Instead of having cadence, we usually expedite. THe way we expedite is also grounded in the idea that we should not be idle and we should be “utilised’ all the time.
Second the downside of multitasking really is the time it takes to resume a task after an interruption. It is a set up time or a transaction cost.
A couple of things were illustrated. I offered that the pomodoro technique was a great help to handle multitasking. Essentially the pomodoro technique provides cadence and thereby suppresses the interruption driven work style. In exchange it provides predictable windows to address urgent requests. In this way it forces triage between urgent and not urgent while preserving the ability to adapt the work stream. It also enforces the idea that it is good to have idle time. Other signalling techniques were offered to prevent interruptions.
It was interesting to witness that the default attitude we had to resolve the problem of interruptions was to increase the batch sizes to avoid them. Essentially the same idea as reducing the set-up time in the industry. Importantly the discussion turned to techniques to reduce the transaction cost (context switching time) associated to multiple tasks. This is the realm of getting things done techniques (to-do lists to boot). One interesting remark from David Chilcott is to note down the next step in your current task before switching to another task.
To summarise, multitasking is good. Interruption is evil.
What techniques do you use to cope with interruptions ? What do you do to facilitate context switching ?
