Multitasking Harmful To Productivity

Greyfox writes: "According to a CNN article, a person who is multitasking several things takes a hit on his productivity. Oddly enough, it reads almost exactly like a description of the problem with multitasking on computers; context switches cost, especially if you have to swap a lot of crap out in order to fit the new process into memory. So basically, an employee who can stay focussed on one thing for long periods of time is going to have higher productivity than one who has to handle constant interrupts. Now if I could get my manager to buy into that ..."

It depends on attention span

[mwillems]

I know myself... have a very short attention span. I am greatly effective at any one task for a few minutes, then interest fades.

By Multitasking furiously I prevent my mind from getting bored. I am typing this now; on to a work related email next, then read a bit of a book about advertising copy and layout, then to this month's Linux Journal, and so on. Some of us work very effectively this way. More of us than you would imagine, I think/

Michael

Re:Old debate

[Ubi_UK]

Actually no
Taylorising is making the proces as efficient as possible by analising all the steps and finding out the most efficient way to perform each step. This will also give you more effieincy, but in the computerworld that should be compared to re-examining the keyboard and placing the most-used keys in placed where they can be accessed the easiest (for windows: placing CTRL-ALT-DEL in the middle). Taylorising will get you RSI, that's for sure.

William James, not Henry

[Anonymous Coward]

Henry was the author, William the psychologist.

Aritcle on joel about programmer context switching

[kingshukb]

There is a nice article [joelonsoftware.com] on Joel [joelonsoftware.com] called Human Task Switches Considered Harmful explaining how context switching is extremely damaging for programmer's productivity. He of course does not have any statistical data to back it up with, but it is a convincing read if you have worked on more than one programming task at a time for whatever reason. Most managers who have not done programming themselves unfortunately do not understand this.

Re:I multitask for a reason

[leereyno]

What you're doing is an example of cooperative multitasking. You choose when you do the context switch and which task you pay attention to next.

The problems start when you're forced to do pre-emptive multitasking. This is what happens when you're busy trying to do one thing while the phone is constantly ringing, people are coming and asking you questions, or any number of other distractions are vieing for your attention. It is at this point that productivity plummits because you're spending 75% of your time dealing with bullshit. I once worked as a tech at Fry's Electronics and that is the exact kind of thing I had to deal with. Here I was supposed to be fixing customer's computers but I wasn't able to do that because Fry's wouldn't hire enough people to handle things like customers at the counter, processing returns, etc. etc. I quit that job and I hope I never have another one like it.

Lee