Effective Multitasking?

 

Situation: You're So Busy it Hurts...

This article in today's NY Times, Slow Down, Multitaskers, and Don’t Read in Traffic  starts off like so many others, "Don't talk on your phone and drive", "Don't pat your head and rub your belly" - that sort of thing.  Further down in the piece, however, it gets much more interesting.  They reference a few different studies that help you think about your personal productivity in a different way.

Ask yourself the question, "When is multitasking more productive (for me) and when does it just break down into a series of distractions that actually slow me down?"

Here are some article highlights that offer some guidance on the subject:

"In a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites. "

So what's your personal recovery time?

"For the executive recruiters, the optimum workload was four to six projects, taking two to five months each."

...and how many projects are optimal for you?

"That total is an update of research published 18 months ago, based on surveys and interviews with professionals and office workers, which concluded that 28 percent of their time was spent on what they deemed interruptions and recovery time before they returned to their main tasks."

What percentage of your time is spent dealing with interruptions?

My point is that it's worth taking a few minutes to think about these issues, just to see if your everyday habits make sense.  It's so easy to just plow ahead doing ten different things at once without really knowing if that makes sense.  If you're not careful you could end up reviewing a bunch of dry doucments, talking on the phone, and blogging all at the same time on a Sunday morning when you should be with your kids... um, ok... gotta go.