Do you believe in multi-tasking?

Dear Wade
Very interesting your perspective

In this situation, where a person performs a task for some time, they have the opportunity to perform another task at another time. The work is organized so that there is rotation in the accomplishment of the tasks.

What raises the issue of people's competencies to accomplish these tasks

I don't believe it's a matter of competency. A person can be competent to perform many different types of tasks. The issue is that if a person is performing too many tasks without completing any of them, they are wasting considerable effort by repeatedly switching between those tasks.

Rather than attempt to multi-task, it is better to finish an important task and deliver that value, then switch to another important task and focus on it.

Think of it like a production floor. A multi-tasking model would have a person perform a little bit of work at one station, then walk over to perform a little bit of work on another machine, then walk back to the first station to do a little bit more work, and repeat this. This would be good exercise but would generate significant waste in the value stream and delay final delivery.

An efficient process would complete a task or set of tasks at one station, then move the work to the next. People and projects are no different. We typically can't eliminate all distractions, but we should avoid purposefully multi-tasking when possible. Too many people try to accomplish multiple things at once but only damage their own productivity. Similarly, too many organizations think they gain value by assigning their teams to multiple projects when they could deliver far more value by delivering one high-value project at a time.

Dear Sreepathi
Interesting your question
Thanks for sharing

Any role you play always has more than one task

I would like to understand your question better. You refers to:
- Play multiple roles at once?
- Play multiple roles, rotating one at a time?

In my consulting days, I used to lead leadership groups through an exercise that demonstrated exactly how problematic "multi-tasking" was for productivity. It went something like this:

1. Give everyone a piece of paper and a pen/pencil

2. Tell them you will show them six words each consisting of six letters; the task is to write them down, in order, on their piece of paper. You will time the task and see how long it takes the fastest and slowest member of the group to write it all down.

3. Show them the words (example: Urgent Faster Smooth Trucks Saturn Benign)

Usually, it would take anywhere from ~15-30 seconds for the group to complete.

4. Tell them you're going to do it again, except this time, you want them to write the words one letter at a time, starting from the first letter of each word for all six, then the second, etc. So instead of just writing "Urgent", "Smooth", etc, they would write "U-", "S-", and then go back and add "U-r-", "S-m-", until they spelled each word.

5. Show them a new set of words (six words, six letters), and time it.

For the second set, I would normally see completion times of ~45 - 90+ seconds. In addition, the *quality* of their writing was much worse; words were often badly spaced and crunched into corners or weirdly spaced out.

Obviously, it's a very simple example of a fairly complex problem, but that is generally what happens when you multi-task. Instead of focusing on one task to completion, you are asked to bounce between several tasks at once, only completing a little at a time.

Not only does it actually take *much* longer to complete one task, the quality of that work is much poorer.

"Multi-tasking" is a way of life in the modern business world. But there is a gulf of difference between "managing multiple assignments" and "managing simultaneous/competing assignments".