In August 2011, I posted my thoughts on multi-tasking. I wondered if multi-tasking was:
really just shifting back and forth between two or more tasks, making a little progress on one and then shifting to the other, making a little progress on the second and shifting to the next, and so on.
I have a good friend who swears by her ability to multi-task. In fact, she commits to so many activities (she thinks saying "no" is the equivalent of being rude), that she almost never gives her complete attention to any one subject, and often doesn't complete what she promised by the deadline. In addition, she is a complete slave to her technology (every email and text message MUST be read immediately), so she rarely goes more than 15-20 minutes without some kind of interruption. She thinks herself an expert multi-tasker.
Right now, I'm reading and reviewing "The 4 Disciplines of Execution" by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim Huling. On page 26, I found the following statement:
"...when people try to perform similar tasks at the same time, such as writing an email and talking on the phone, they compete to use the same part of the brain... the brain simply slows down."
To me, this means that you may fool yourself into thinking you are being more efficient, but everything you're doing actually takes longer to complete. Consider the progress record (in the figure to the right) for accomplishing three tasks, each of which should take one hour.
With the change in focus from the first activity to the second and then to the third, with the time the accompanying change in mindset takes, plus a few of the inevitable interruptions (phone calls, people coming to your office, etc.), it would take approximately 230 minutes to complete these three tasks, or 27% more time than the three tasks would take if performed consecutively. If you factor the three interruptions into the consecutive tasks calculation, multi-tasking still takes 18% longer than the consecutive tasks.
As McChesney, Covey and Huling say (on page 26), "multi-taskers sacrifice [significant] performance on the primary task" [the Wildly Important Goal] in favor of slower forward progress on multiple issues. They become "suckers for irrelevancy."
I know of an A/E firm that tried to pursue two very large, very important WIGs at the same time -- one WIG was to totally change the firm's organization from a top-down "command and control" type to a matrix-type organization; the other was to change the attitude of 240 people in five offices in two states to recognize that and start acting like they were all one company, when some of those offices had previously been encouraged to compete with each other.
Each WIG required people to make so many changes that unrest spread through the staff like a summertime forest fire in California. The president ultimately told some people that they didn't have to make some of the changes, which totally angered those people who had already managed to work their way through those changes. Ultimately, neither WIG achieved the success it might otherwise have had, although both WIGs could have totally succeeded if they had not been tried at the same time.
For me, the bottom line is that too much multi-tasking can be equally dangerous to an individual as to an organization; and strong focus on one challenge at a time will not only get you to success faster, but might eliminate other challenges.