Nice Article on the perils of multi-tasking

I came across this article today and wanted to pass it along. I've noticed a substantial increase the number of articles, studies, and general commentary on the adverse effects of multi-tasking. Here's another one that provides some additional evidence and insight. It's a very quick read, well-worth the time, but first finish what you're doing so you don't multi-task yourself!

http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20131003165549-128811924-why-focus-should-really-be-the-next-big-thing

Want a Quick way to improve productivity: Stop Multi-tasking!

Multi-tasking is so pervasive in organizations, and modern life in general, that we often don’t even think about how damaging it is to productivity. Even worse many people claim to be great multi-taskers whose productivity doesn’t suffer from switching between tasks. Unfortunately all the research now being done fully supports, what even a simple exercise in multi-tasking shows—it’s not only damaging to individual productivity its devastating to organizational productivity. This is particularly true when the work being done is only one activity in a large process or project—as most work in organizations is.

Let’s define multi-tasking as stopping one task, before it is either complete or has reached a logical stopping point to go and do something else. This seemingly benign behavior creates two significant problems. First it drains the efficiency of the individual, because every time a task is set aside to go do something else the person must spend time “getting back up to speed” when s/he returns to the task. For most of what I call “knowledge work” this time can be considerable, and in many instances this re-starting is also the source of errors or bugs as things are missed. If a resource has to re-start a task several times, the amount of time spent repeatedly preparing to do the work, can easily exceed the time spent doing the task. Additionally, because people are always busy, either working on a task or getting back up to speed on one, it appears that there is no spare capacity anywhere, no efficiency to be gained. And many organizations find themselves having to add staff, even though in reality there is substantial hidden capacity, on top of the frustration and quality problems stemming from multi-tasking.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, the larger, and less well understood, issue is what it does to organizational efficiency. When people are forced to multi-task, that task gets interrupted and set aside, unfinished. But the clock on the work doesn’t stop, it just keeps ticking; so that customer’s project, application, product, claim, or whatever is not moving, but it’s eating up time, waiting for the person to come back to finish it and move it to the next step in the process. Each interruption delays the completion of the task and extends the lead time. Since multi-tasking is likely to happen at each step of a process these delays multiply quickly. Lead times and backlogs can grow quickly this way and jeopardize the performance of the company, eroding customer satisfaction. It’s not easy to precisely quantify how much lead times are inflated, but it’s typically far more than one would think.

I typically use a simple game to illustrate just how much multi-tasking impacts organizational performance. If you like you can do it on your own in just a minute. I ask people to perform three tasks: write all the numbers 1-20 in the first column, all the letters A-T in the second, and then to draw twenty shapes in the third in the sequence circle-square-triangle. I then give people two options for how to accomplish the work. They can either complete it by working one task at a time, start to finish, (all the letters first then the numbers and finally the shapes), or they can multi-task doing one number, one letter, one shape and then repeating, as in 1, A, Circle, 2, B, square, etc. Not surprisingly everyone wants to work the tasks start to finish. At the same time they all readily agree that the second way, multi-tasking, is more like how they have to work in their organization. To play the game do the activities each way, timing each run separately. When you’re ready, turn the page to continue the discussion.

I always find it best to do the game in a group because you are assured to get a range of results, and a measure of statistical validity. Having done this with several thousand people over the years, the average times to complete the three projects is typically:

Multi-tasking:                    85 seconds

Without Multi-tasking:  45 seconds

 

While it’s a simple game, it’s a very powerful illustration of the impact of multi-tasking:

·         If you multi-task, it takes twice as long to complete the tasks

·         If you don’t multi-task, you can do almost twice as many projects in the same time

·         Everyone agrees its easier and probably produces better quality without multi-tasking—so you’re not getting more by “working harder”

In the multi-tasking iteration all three of the tasks finish at virtually the same time, about 85 seconds. But when they work each task start to finish, the projects don’t finish in a big wave, they finish one at a time staggered about every 15 seconds (15-30-45 sec. for the three projects), meaning that the first two projects finish dramatically earlier than with multi-tasking. It’s not hard to extrapolate the results further if we imagine that each of the three tasks was just one step in a larger process within an organization. If we assume there were 10 sequential steps in the project, the three projects would take 850 seconds to complete under multi-tasking mode, since each step takes 85 seconds to complete the three projects. However, working start to finish on each task the first task would be done and passed on after just 15 seconds, the second after 30 and the last one after 45 seconds. Each successive step, working the same way, would complete its stage in 15 seconds and pass it on. So for a 10 step project the first project would finish after just 150 seconds, with the second one at 165, and the third 15 seconds later and 180 seconds. Compared to 850 seconds under multi-tasking, this translates into a lead time reduction of more than 75%.

To be sure, reducing multi-tasking is difficult, and eliminating it entirely is probably impossible. It requires a shift in a number of common practices and some very common beliefs people have about how to work and what it means to provide good service to customers and colleagues. But what about the alternative? Continuing high levels of multi-tasking reduces efficiency, produces lower output, extends customer lead times, threatens quality, and makes everyone work harder for lower results. Personally I don’t know many faster, more effective ways of improving productivity, profits, and service than reducing multi-tasking.

Here’s a final thought to highlight just how much multi-tasking is impacting your business and its productivity: Do you or your colleagues ever come to work early, stay late, work from home, or work on weekends? People tell me these are some of their most productive hours…when they aren’t getting multi-tasked!  

Links to Press on Multi-tasking:
http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2012/03/the-magic-of-doing-one-thing-a.html#%21
http://business.time.com/2013/04/17/dont-multitask-your-brain-will-thank-you/
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/18/12-reasons-to-stop-multitasking-now/
http://psychology.about.com/od/cognitivepsychology/a/costs-of-multitasking.htm
Also check NPR, they did a couple of interesting segments on the radio this year and several years ago.

Multi-Tasking: Why projects take so long and still go late

In most project environments multi-tasking is a way of life. This seemingly harmless activity, often celebrated as a desirable skill, is one of the biggest culprits in late projects, long project durations, and low project output. At the same time it is one of the least understood factors in managing projects.

For companies where projects are of strategic importance, the stakes are very high. Whether it is delivering their product or service, bringing new products to market, or expanding/ upgrading their operations with new facilities, systems, or capabilities, the financial impact of being able to reduce project durations and costs, increase the volume of completed projects, or simply deliver more projects on-time is enormous. So understanding how this often overlooked practice of multi-tasking is of critical importance to most companies.

Multi-tasking and project performance

Multi-tasking is the act of stopping a task before it is completed and shifting to something else; in software development the term “thrashing” is often used to describe this practice. When a task is stopped and started there is the immediate effect of a loss of efficiency. Each time a person has to re-start a task, time is required to become re-familiarized with the work and get re-set in where he was in the process. It is very much like the physical set-ups done on a machine in production. Each time you tear down a machine to do another task, you have to set it up to run the part again.

While the loss in efficiency is not insignificant, especially in “knowledge work,” it is far from the most important reason multi-tasking is so damaging. What happens when a task is interrupted mid-stream is that its completion is delayed. Most people in project management will readily agree that it is not important when a task finishes, it is important when the project finishes. The diagram below shows three tasks a given resource must do, related to three different projects, and when they are expected to finish: Task A after 10 days, B after 20, and C after 30.

But if the resource has to stop and start the task even just once in the process, the actual completion times of the tasks quickly extends, as shown below. Task A now finishes only after 20 days instead of 10, task B at 25 days rather than at 20 days, and task C may still finish on-time at 30 days, without considering the impact of the loss in efficiency.

The delays on tasks A and B immediately translates into are delays on the downstream tasks in those projects, who now can only start at Day 20 and 25 respectively. The impact on project A is illustrated below. Even in a very small project like this one with just four tasks, and with only one instance of multi-tasking, the project is delivered almost 30% late. It’s not hard to see how the more likely scenario of having several or many instances of multi-tasking during a project can cause the delays to accumulate considerably and lengthen project durations considerably.

In many companies the impact of multi-tasking is obscured by the fact that in spite of its prevalence most projects still finish on time. While this reliability is nice, it masks the even more significant opportunity to cut project durations substantially. If projects are being delivered on or close to schedule, and multi-tasking is occurring, it can only mean that the task estimates used in the plan are significantly inflated. In other words, we are planning for the lost time due to multi-tasking, as this is the only way that the time losses could be recovered. In such cases, reducing the multi-tasking offers enormous potential to cut planned project durations substantially, without eroding delivery performance. These companies are in a great position to reap the benefits of delivering more projects faster.

For years we have put the project managers, executives, and teams through a simple project simulation game using beads, first with multi-tasking, and then a second time, blocking it. The results are nearly always that the time to complete each of the two projects is cut in half, enabling them to double the output, and cut individual durations in half, simply by eliminating multi-tasking. And the same happens when companies drive out the multi-tasking in their own projects.

Is Multi-tasking really so prevalent?

Given the substantial negative impact on durations and project volume, it makes sense to explore just how common multi-tasking is. Since multi-tasking is difficult to see or measure precisely, we need to look at some other things to answer this question. The first issue is to understand the opportunity to multi-task. The way to see if your organization has the “opportunity” to do bad multi-tasking is ask how many jobs/ tasks an individual has on their desk at any given point in time. If there is more than one task that could be worked on a person’s desk then there is the opportunity for multi-tasking. When we ask managers how many tasks are on any given persons desk at one time, the not surprising answer is usually more than five.

The next way to check is to ask people how often they get interrupted or asked to work on something else that is “hot”, “urgent”, or “important”. In most companies one need not even ask this as “constantly shifting priorities” is usually one of people’s biggest complaints in projects. Every meeting that shifts or alters the priorities of projects, or adds new important things for someone to do, is a source of multi-tasking. How often does it happen in your organization?

Another way to look at it is to recognize that in most organizations where multiple projects are being done simultaneously, the resources who do the work on a project have to serve multiple, different project managers. For these project managers what is most important tends to be their projects. As a result they typically create pressure on resources to do their work first, institutionalizing multi-tasking. And when the multi-tasking starts to creep in, it initiates a negative spiral that only increases the pressure to multi-task. If one resource starts the multi-tasking, it delays the completion of their tasks, putting some projects behind. This increases the pressure on project managers and executives to adjust priorities to compensate, which in turn creates more, bad multi-tasking. It’s not hard to see how this spiral quickly becomes the reality we see in many organizations where managers at all levels are quickly pulled into managing work priorities across the organization on a daily basis.

On top of it, many resources who work on projects also support daily operational functions like QA/ QC, production, engineering, customer service. This support role means that they are frequently presented with unexpected, usually urgent things to do which readily drive more multi-tasking. The result is that in the majority of companies there is the opportunity and the pressure to create a significant amount of bad multi-tasking.

If it’s so bad, why do we do it?

Our experience with hundreds of companies is that there are three central reasons organizations find themselves in the trap of multi-tasking:
1. Lack of understanding of the impact of multi-tasking
2. Incorrect assumptions
3. The desire to do a good job

The simple fact is that most people and organizations do not understand how damaging multi-tasking is. Our clients who see the impact illustrated in the bead exercise, mentioned earlier, are stunned and amazed that eliminating the practice results in a doubling of output and a halving of the project durations, with no other improvements. Once people do start to understand how damaging the practice is they become much more conscious of it, and start to change their behavior and the behavior of their organization.

But understanding is not enough. The drivers of multi-tasking are built into the processes, measurements, and systems most companies manage their projects. We strive hard to keep people busy all of the time, to maximize the output of all of our resources and be efficient. Performance measures on project managers and executives motivate them to focus on delivering individual projects, without understanding of the impact of their actions on the rest of the pipeline. Conventional scheduling and pipelining tools pay no attention to these factors and routinely overload resources making multi-tasking nearly inevitable.

The second reason is ‘incorrect assumptions.’ Chief among these is the belief that “the earlier you start a project, the earlier it will finish.” While this is probably a valid statement in a single project environment where resources do not need to work on multiple projects, starting new projects earlier only increases the work in process in a multi-project environment and with it the likelihood of multi-tasking. People will get out of a building during a fire alarm much faster if they don’t all rush at the door at once. Though it seems counter-intuitive, projects will finish earlier and we will get more of them done, if we start them later.

Again here the obstacle for companies in applying these principles is that these erroneous assumptions are built into the processes, measures, and systems we use to manage projects. The pressure from upper management and sales to add more projects or start them earlier can make it virtually impossible for managers below to cope with the pressure to multi-task. Conventional software, nearly all of which is based on Critical Path methodology, fail to provide managers with a way to accurately evaluate task priorities across projects. Critical Path can identify which tasks have priority over others within a given project, but it breaks down when considering tasks on different projects. How many times does it happen that someone works on an urgent task, only to learn later that it ended up sitting a downstream step waiting on something else, or because the priorities shifted again?

The final reason for the pervasiveness of multi-tasking is that people want to do a good job. People multi-task in response to a perceived need of the organization: an urgent job, a hot task, a breakdown, a customer complaint, etc. Shifting to work urgent, pressing jobs gives people a chance to be heroes, to save the day, or put out the fire. In fact if you have multi-tasking in your organization, it is an almost sure sign that you have people who care about and are working hard to do a good job for the organization. It is essential to help people to realize the impact of multi-tasking, so they shift their belief of what it means “to do a good job.” But this must be backed by the needed process, measurement, and system changes or their efforts will be overwhelmed by these other forces.

Reducing Bad Multi-tasking

The impact on project performance from reducing multi-tasking is profound. Without so many interruptions and delays on individual tasks the work flows much more quickly and smoothly. Without adding resources or working people any harder, more projects get completed, faster. And without the constant pressure to re-prioritize work, and with more projects tracking on-time, the organizational climate improves dramatically. With these improvements follow the business results companies in project environments are universally seeking. The typical results we have seen companies achieve are:

On-time completions to 95+%
Project durations cut by 1/3 or more
Project output 25%-100%

To learn more about how to reduce multi-tasking and start to put your organization on a path to these kinds of results, read “More projects, faster, with less resources: Critical Chain Project Management.” This article is available free of charge on http://www.tocc.com/, or you can have it emailed to you by requesting it by name from info@tocc.com.




About TOC Center, Inc. The TOC Center works with clients across the full spectrum of project environments to help them create and implement sustainable processes for delivering more projects, faster with the same resources. Over the past 20 years we have worked with such organizations as American Airlines, Bosch, Eircom, First Solar, Genencor, GM, HP, Intel, ITT, Kroger, Pfizer, Stryker, US Navy. For a free webinar for your management on how to accelerate projects, send an email request to info@tocc.com. More information and actual client results available at http://www.tocc.com/.