Juggling Act: The Outer Limits of Multitasking

  PM Network  

Piles of papers line your desk. Your inbox is full and your phone is ringing off the hook. No big deal. You’ve got it covered. You are a multitasking machine— confidently moving back and forth between tasks, sometimes working on more than two projects at once. But at the end of the day, things are no closer to completion than when you began.

What went wrong?

Perhaps your multitasking isn’t as effective as you thought.

That was the case with Mike Sanders, PMP, an IT project manager for electric company Southern California Edison, Rosemead, California, USA.

A year ago, Mr. Sanders was driving down a freeway while simultaneously participating in two conference calls. “I would un-mute at opportune times and chime in on one call or the next,” he says. And in between, he was eating a late lunch and planning a presentation he was to give later that evening.

“I was known as a multitasker, but this was beyond that,” Mr. Sanders says.

“I thought, ‘I’m a power-tasker. I really need to find out more about my abilities, because I’m really wonderful and I can do all these things. I need to share this and maybe do a seminar on it.’”

But before he could teach others about his power-tasking ways, he needed hard numbers to support his claim. So he went back a year and looked at: g The …

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