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 ..."

Comments

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