Welcome to the multitasking jungle
5:27 AM
Ever since I remember, I was proud of my multitasking skills. I could juggle with 2-3 projects at a time, plus some personal projects. For some reason, it was easy for me to just leave a task here, start another one there, go back to the third one. I had this system of post its, to do lists, calendar notifications. For some reason, it just worked.
And then I found something that Gerald Weinberg said in his book Quality Software Management: Vol. 1 System Thinking.
This means that if one person has 3 projects assigned, then from an 8 hours workday, a bit over 3 hours is time spent just trying to get in the mood of the next project.
What amazes me is that even this book is quite old, from 1991 (so the finding is at least as old as the book), we haven't really changed our ways of working until only recently, when the idea of having small teams with high allocations for few projects started being implemented. I've heard about this idea via Agile, but maybe others heard about it earlier.
Imagine this scenario: you go to work, you have 2 projects that you are assigned to. So, you spend about 1.5 hours just flipping through emails/documents, trying to remember where some info is. What if you need to switch between the projects multiple times per day? You cannot really work in the morning for project A and in the evening for project B. Add to the mix some meetings and you've got yourself a full day of work, at the end of which your todo list is as long as it was in the morning.
Viewed from the lean perspective, this time is a waste, because it doesn't bring any value to the customer. That is, the customer would not be willing to pay for this. And still, this context switching time creeps up in our time reports and in the customer's bill. Something is not quite right.
Until we all have the chance to actually work on one project at a time, is there something that we could do to reduce this time?
There are a couple of things that we could look at: the Pareto principle, the Parkinson's law and time management.
The first things I ask myself is: how urgent is this task? how big is the effort? Based on that, I select when I want to do the task. All the time I have the list filtered, to hide the wait/done/obsolete tasks, and any other task that is not to be done today. Before I go home, I review the list, make sure it has the relevant info for "tomorrow". It makes my life much easier in the morning, and I know what to focus on.
Being a juggler works only in the circus
And then I found something that Gerald Weinberg said in his book Quality Software Management: Vol. 1 System Thinking.
This means that if one person has 3 projects assigned, then from an 8 hours workday, a bit over 3 hours is time spent just trying to get in the mood of the next project.
What amazes me is that even this book is quite old, from 1991 (so the finding is at least as old as the book), we haven't really changed our ways of working until only recently, when the idea of having small teams with high allocations for few projects started being implemented. I've heard about this idea via Agile, but maybe others heard about it earlier.
Imagine this scenario: you go to work, you have 2 projects that you are assigned to. So, you spend about 1.5 hours just flipping through emails/documents, trying to remember where some info is. What if you need to switch between the projects multiple times per day? You cannot really work in the morning for project A and in the evening for project B. Add to the mix some meetings and you've got yourself a full day of work, at the end of which your todo list is as long as it was in the morning.
Viewed from the lean perspective, this time is a waste, because it doesn't bring any value to the customer. That is, the customer would not be willing to pay for this. And still, this context switching time creeps up in our time reports and in the customer's bill. Something is not quite right.
Let's haggle the price
Until we all have the chance to actually work on one project at a time, is there something that we could do to reduce this time?
There are a couple of things that we could look at: the Pareto principle, the Parkinson's law and time management.
The Pareto principle
This is a fancy name for the 80-20 rule. 80% of results is achieved with 20% of the work. What is really important in the task list, that actually generates results? I guess by now we all agree that switching between projects doesn't fit in this 20%.
Often, the tasks are inter-related. Solving something means solving something else. Nowadays I started looking for connections between my tasks, and seeing if I could achieve more results by doing (hopefully smarter) less tasks. Sounds a bit cryptic, but it just means looking at common areas between the tasks and tackling those.
The Parkinson's law
Wikipedia gives a nice overview on this. "Work expands as to fill the time available for its completion." In other words, if you want to do something quickly, allow less time for it. I would argue that this is at the bottom of the time boxing technique as well.
One tool to help with this is to divide the day in segments. Just tell yourself "I will work 25 minutes on this task to finish it". And really focus on it.
Time management
When it comes to time management, I personally use a todo list that looks something like this:| Project | Task name | Urgent / not urgent | Big / small effort | When to do | Deadline | Status | Comment |
| name of project | name/description of task | is it urgent or not? | does it require a lot of work or is it something quick? | today / next / later | deadline of task | nothing / ongoing / wait / done / obsolete | any followup comments |
It may look like a lot of work, but actually it's very quick. Many times I skip the deadline and/or project name columns.
The Pareto principle and the Parkinson's law can be applied when prioritizing.
A final word
Your tasking jungle is going to be as thick as you let it. If you find that you cannot handle it alone, call a friend. Or say "no" sometimes.
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