Lisa over at Management Craft has done an experiment where she stopped multitasking for 4 entire days and focused instead on one project for extended periods of time. What was her result? Multitasking is the devil. Management Craft: Death to Multi-tasking! Long live chunking!.
Death to Multi-tasking! Long live chunking!
Maybe I am just slow. Maybe I am just an old recovering ex-yuppie, holding on to the useless business fads and cultural remnants of the time (that be the 90s).
Perhaps you have already figured this out.
Multi-tasking is a dumb, stressful, and a great way to suboptimize. I am not alone in this thinking. I have been talking to several interesting experts for a project and many of them repeated the same thing – the supposed benefits of multi-tasking are bunk!
Your thoughts?
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This is an interesting notion; that of chunking. When I read the blog my first thought was about resumes that I see. It seems to be an asset to be able to multi-task. Or at least applicants think it is. I know that I see my colleagues drop task and miss deadlines because they have too much on their plate. I have to include myself in that group as well. I am frustrated with the whole thing and the more I am asked to do, the more I have to re-prioritize. Its is a heck of a roller coaster ride. Tell me if your experiment produces similar results.
So far, so good I think
Had the setback of a hard drive on my laptop go bad over the weekend, which is a huge distraction. So I’ve offloaded all development to a desktop PC.