There is
abundant evidence about people’s inability to multi-task. For some reason, the
human brain seems particularly suited for concentration
(on just one thing…), and multitasking and distraction seem antithetical to
that. Although email is so pervasive and omnipresent, it is also the culprit of
many “lost” moments, and lapses in productivity (see this
paper on that topic).
Interestingly,
people who believe they are successful at multi-tasking may often only be
fooling themselves (see this
paper on that topic). Being a man, I am not supposed to be able to multi-task, of course. And when I try it, I
tend to fail pretty spectacularly. I get distracted too easily. This brilliant
(as well as funny and entertaining) presentation from my esteemed colleague Zeger
van Hese sums up nicely how distraction can be so pervasive by creating lots
of desirable side effects.
Besides the
detrimental effect on productivity, there is one other reason to be weary of
multitasking. It has to do with bottlenecks
and the Theory of
Constraints. In Agile we encourage working independently and in parallel,
to improve productivity. Bottlenecks are (by definition) the single greatest risk
to meeting iteration goals, and it turns out that multitasking plays a
pernicious role in that.
As Maassen,
Matts and Geary have pointed out in their book “Commitment” (2013), multitasking
creates implicit bottlenecks. When
someone is working on more than one task at a time, they hamper visibility on
the (lack of) progress of the task they are momentarily not working on. All with the best of intentions, of course, just
like when I try to multi task myself. You do this to try and finish more things
quicker, but unfortunately you often wind up delaying delivery, rather than expediting
it.
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