Tom Breur
7 December 2014
“Why don’t we ‘just’
already get started?” It seems such a logical conclusion. When you start earlier,
you’ll finish earlier. But does it really work that way? Sometimes, intuition can be deceiving.
Whenever we play Henrik Kniberg’s name
game, people seem to experience some confusion when it isn’t immediately obvious
to them why writing names actually take longer
when you start them earlier. To be fair, some
jobs may finish sooner, but on the whole work (in this case: “writing a name”)
takes longer in the multi tasking condition of the name game.
And that, of course, is
exactly what happens when you begin work early:
because the number of projects you are working on perforce grows, you
voluntarily increase the amount of multi-tasking or task switching you need to
do.
The reason you will wind
up doing more multi-tasking is because you start something new, while
apparently some older tasks haven’t been quite finished, yet. You may be
waiting on something or somebody, or there may be a “logical” sequence of
events to work through. The reason I put logical in quotation marks, is that
the “logic” depends on how costly you assess multitasking to be…
Although this goes
directly against our industrial age mindset, it is sometimes more “efficient”
to swarm around blockers or impediments. It may seem you “waste” time doing
someone else’s job (rather than waiting!). But what “efficient” means, really
hinges on how you view productivity. As Drucker puts it: “Efficiency
is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.”
“One of the significant discoveries of cognitive
psychologists in recent decades is that switching from one task to another is
effortful, especially under time pressure” – Kahneman 2011,
Thinking Fast and Slow. So why not consider starting late next time? You’ll have more information, too!
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