The Myth of Multi-Tasking
So, you think you are good at multi-tasking. Perhaps you even list it on your CV. Multi-tasking seems like a “must have” skill in this busy world we live in, but instead of helping you get-ahead, is it actually holding you back?
Multiple projects/ multiple priorities
Everything is high priority, and everything is urgent. The Eisenhower Matrix is great in theory, but most of us have no-one to actually delegate anything to! The urgent drowns out the important, but everything on our list ‘must be done’.
Many BAs work across multiple teams or projects, which can be great, as it gives us variety in our work, different challenges, different stakeholders and plenty of opportunity to learn.
HOWEVER! The reality of working in this way is that your stakeholders don’t know or care that you are spinning many plates and expect outputs and answers at the same speed.
Notifications
Email. Teams. Slack. Chat. We have messages and notifications flowing in from multiple channels, and they often cause us to stop what we were doing/ thinking/ saying to instantly investigate. Most of these do not really need instantaneous action. Remote working has normalized being in meetings, whilst ‘simultaneously’ checking emails and responding to messages via many channels.
The instant message fallacy: just because a message arrives instantly, does not mean it needs an instant response.
Notifications are impacting the quality of our attention, our creativity and productivity.
Context Switching
Allowing ourselves to be distracted (or ‘notified’) seriously disrupts our ability to think, plan and decide. Moving between different apps, topics, tasks and projects requires time for our mind to adjust to the change and ‘tune in’ to the new activity. We typically underestimate how long this mental adjustment takes.
The cost of context switching is significant. We can lose a massive chunk of our day by trying to multi-task. “Each task switch might waste only 1/10th of a second, but if you do a lot of switching in a day it can add up to a loss of 40% of your productivity” (Psychology Today, 2012).
Moving between different levels of detail is particularly taxing for our brains. This is something BAs are doing regularly. We might move from a kick-off meeting for a new piece of work, which requires strategic thinking and creativity, to a clarification session looking in detail at requirements and issues, which involves recall, lateral thinking and problem solving. Wondering why you are feeling so exhausted when you have just sat still all day? We are firing up many parts of our brain, using different cognitive functions and not allowing ourselves any time to recover and recharge.
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Flow
There is a brilliant video by Henrik Kniberg, which contains everything you need to know about:
- work in progress
- productivity
- saying no (or not yet)
- context switching
- multi-tasking.
It emphasizes the need to get things done, before you start doing something else. It’s better for you, and it’s better for all the stakeholders you are trying to keep happy (yes – even the ones who have to ‘wait’).
Accomplishment
Constant interruption and inching forward affects how we see ourselves, our levels of motivation and our sense of accomplishment. Counter-intuitively, getting stuff done gives us the energy to get more stuff done. Failing to make real progress saps our energy and makes it harder to be motivated and effective. We all get a sense of satisfaction from completing tasks on our to-do list. The more attention we give each task, the more tasks we can achieve. We can still have multiple tasks on the list, or multiple projects on the books at the same time, but we need to manage our time across these activities and avoid unnecessary switching (of both projects and levels of detail).
Conclusion
Given the complexity of most projects, in terms of interdependencies, stakeholder relationships and technical challenges, we really need to be paying attention to the task in hand.
Research from Stanford University shows that trying to talk, read, process and respond using multiple channels (i.e. meetings, emails and messages) actually lowers our IQ!
Simple steps can make a big difference. Protect chunks of time. Turn off notifications. Manage your diary to avoid unnecessary context switches. Take a lunch break.
We all need to comprehend that the once prized skill of “multi-tasking” is actually a sophisticated and covert form of procrastination, and it’s making us less intelligent and effective.
Further reading