Article URL: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-multi-tasking-myth/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47795878 Points: 1 # Comments: 0
Article URL: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-multi-tasking-myth/
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47795878
In Quality Software Management : Systems Thinking, Gerald Weinberg proposed a rule of thumb to calculate the waste caused by project switching:
Even adding a single project to your workload is profoundly debilitating by Weinberg’s calculation. You lose 20% of your time. By the time you add a third project to the mix, nearly half your time is wasted in task switching. This can be a problem even if you’re only working on a single project at any time. The impact of simply letting your email, phone, and instant messaging interrupt what you’re doing can be profound, as documented in this BBC study :
Kathy Sierra wrote a great post comparing multi-tasking and serial tasks and followed it up a year later with a typically insightful post proposing that multi-tasking makes us stupid:
Joel Spolsky compares the task switching penalty for computers and computer programmers:
I’ve often pushed back on demands to work on multiple projects at the same time. It can be difficult to say no , because software developers are notoriously prone to the occupational hazard of optimism .
We typically overestimate how much we’ll actually get done, and multi-tasking exaggerates our own internal biases even more. Whenever possible, avoid interruptions and avoid working on more than one project at the same time. If it’s unavoidable, be brutally honest with yourself – and your stakeholders – about how much you can actually get done under multi-tasking conditions. It’s probably less than you think.