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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 ..."
When you can sit and code for 12 hours, you are WAY more productive than if you work for 3, have to sit in a meeting for 1.5 hours, lunch with your manager, then more work, then another goddamn meeting. Eat while you code; im sure most of us do.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
It hardly takes a scientist to notice that, after you have hung up, you actually spend some time thinking "now, what was it I was doing?" - and that it kills you even more when THAT process is interrupted again. Anyone who has been in the situation knows exactly what that does to you.
Who Wants To Date A Norwegian?
Sounds to me like you're someone who thinks too highly of himself, who couldn't adapt to corporate industry, who hides behind his 'self-employment' as a way to keep from failing in the big time. Sounds like your wife works as your dodge.
Corporations like HP grew to their stature by hiring capable people. Those people take care of the task at hand and adapt to new ones. They don't sit at their desk and say, "I make widgets. You didn't bring me an order for a widget so I can't help you." Those who really rise to the top may not get a lot of coding done. They may have in their day, but mostly now they spend all day making fifteen other people better at their jobs. They are the controllers of the clues, those gems of corporate insight that allow everyone to make sense of their seemingly mindless tasks. Those people are the ones rushing from meeting to meeting.
For the record, I've worked in a government agency, a contractor for a government agency, a small shop, a large corporation. Now I'm a consultant, though not independent (I don't care to work that hard). As a consultant you walk in and are expected to show results from day one. The person who can make or break your project is often that keeper of clues. Find that person (the real one, not the pretender) and you can save yourself a lot of time and headache.
- Sig this!
Funny, I got so much more done back in the days when I used a command line than with this BSOD showing up all the time.
/. itself. How many times a day do you check for new articles and post comments? I have no doubt that it helps as well, providing links to patches or warnings about the latest l337 h4xx0r virii, but it has to cause a hit to productivity at some point. (Unless you're a marketing weenie, of course, they're not productive to begin with.)
IMAO, one of the biggest hits to productivity is
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
That basic concept also applies to driving a car. With new drivers, many of the basic decisions are handled consciously - and there are a lot of them. As you gain experience, your subconscious can take over a lot of the work, so you no longer have to concentrate on so many different things.
New driver:
OK, the light in front of us is turning red, so we have to stop. We need to shift into first, so first we step on the clutch, shift, release the clutch. Now we also need to step on the brake, slowly, paying close attention to where the car in front of us is so we get reasonably close without hitting it. OK, there, we're stopped, I can relax now.
Experienced driver:
Damn, I knew we should have taken the freeway.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I suspect that, except for the staff geniuses and the people focused on make-or-break tasks, the answer is often that the productivity costs of multitasking is offset by its benefits.
Personally I do a lot of multi-tasking as in i'm involved in at least 2 (ideally 3) different coding tasks. I actually find myself to be very productive that way.
This was actually something i recently realized. One of the projects i am involved with was put on hold due to configuration problems with new hardware that was installed, leaving me to work on a single project until the hardware issue is solved.
I find myself getting extremely bored and tired of this single project after about 5 hours or so. I end up not being able to concentrate as well and my motivation level drops considerably compared with its level at the start of the day.
Anyone else notice anything similar?
--sidster
Play lotto? Try http://www.alottofun.com/
Well, duh.
As if computers have made people any more efficient in the first place. How often do I work on a paper for school only to check my email, run my TV Card in a window or listen to MP3's at the same time. Computers are more for entertainment these days than actual productivity. Although they can do that too....
I haven't done any formal XP projects but I've certainly had the experience of developing code alongside another person, and found it works very well.
Exactly, and it is not for more productivity that we quit the Ford working-style... but for a big social advance.
I don't want to do the same thing all day long, I think the point here is more about "I don't want to be bugged at work" than " I don't want to work multitasking"
And it would defenitely be a regression to go back to the Ford style, but yeah, bosses would really like it.
When I'm going insane with soem development I simply announce that I'll be at home till it's fixed. This works because:
This works for me. I can do helpdesk duties because I'm not trying to do anything long term most of the time. Just trying help users. But when I'm programming any interrupt withing a 3-4 hour time span destroys all my concentration.
Curiously - a great many comapnies in the UK don't encourage home working. They don't have a "policy" in place(!).
Come on UK management: why are so many people taking up expensive office space, polluting the planet, wasting their lives on the train, in the car or bus and stressing themselves to death when they *could* be at home 60+% of the time and actually do *more* work?
Why can't women be like Hedy Lamarr - beautiful, talented and inventors of frequency-hopping spread-spectrum techn
One new age, diversity celebrating, politically correct company chick asked me, from her list of prepared questions, "Do you believe you multitask well?" So, I asked her, "Can you define multitask, so I can be sure I'm answering the question you want answered?"
"Doing more than one job at a time", she replied, "like debugging one minute, explaining an important process change to a coworker the next, and then going back to debugging." I thought on this for a moment, wondering if it was a trick question, an honest question, or perhaps an honest question that through the acts of self deception and corporate mind-fucking had become a trick question. So I figured I'd just be honest, and let the chips fall where they may. "No, I do not believe that I multitask well in environments such as this, and in fact I do not believe that anyone multitasks well in an environment such as this. When I worked at Burger King, as a teenager, I could make fries and fill drinks at the same time, but those were not mentally challenging tasks."
"I happen to think that I multitask very well, and don't find that it's all that difficult", she said to me. And it was at that very moment that I realized that I was not meant to work in the corporate environment. Which is fortunate, because I did not get that job, and I'm still self-employed. The PC company chick? She proved that she multitasked well by volunteering for every function that would keep her in meetings, all day every day, and for avoiding work so skillfully, but being seen rushing past on her way from one conference room to the next, she was promoted and now runs the department.
My point? There is a fallacy floating around in corporate America, that in order to produce more output with less time and fewer resources, we must all fill many roles. Instead of focusing on doing one job very, very well, we are supposed to compensate for the fact that jobs have been eliminated, but their roles have not. So we are expected to "multitask" -- and the harder we're expected to swap, the lower the work output, the lower the quality of it. We are never allowed to operate at our full potential because we cannot achieve the mental state necessary to do Great Work. We find ourselves staring at the same problem for half the day, only to spot it within 20 minutes first thing the next morning, before our minds are cluttered up with corporate crap.
Productivity and quality will not improve no matter how many policy changes and process controls we are subjected to. What has to change is the production budget has to rise in direct proportion to shareholder dividend reductions. We are not going to cure anorexia by starving it to death!
Being self employed, I no longer have to deal with the down-sized company (or being down-sized out of a job) and can focus on my work as long as the telephone doesn't ring. It always seems to be that client with the hairiest project who calls right at that moment when the feeling of an inspiration forming is building... and I let my wife answer the call and take a message. Gotta love it.
Warning: This signature may offend some viewers.
I often have half a dozen (or more) things going on at once, switching between screens, applications,
and even computers regularly.
Why?
Because I'm *waiting* for things to happen. Waiting for that 3 minute web page to load,
waiting for that 10 minute compile, waiting for a reply to an ICQ, or whatever.
If I couldn't multitask, I'd be sitting dumbly staring at the screen waiting for whatever task I'm doing to
become ready for my input again.
Sure, a lot of time/energy goes in the context switch. But it's time that's wasted *anyway*.
- Muggins
It should be common knowlege, except management doesn't often seem to make the connection between reality and most management books. There's a great book The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey all about deligating tasks to reduce the mmanager's stress level and allow him to focus. Unfortunately, This book alocates vary little time to task assignment across staff, such that your staff can focus on a limited number of tasks in an organized sequence. This is unfortunate since the productivity of a manager doesn't often ralate as directly as we'd all like to believe; to the productivity of his employees.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
I've noticed this from my experience working as the sysadmin for a tiny ISP. For example, I'd often get calls about tough win9x/nt problems that our tech support people (both of them) couldn't solve while I'm at my desk hacking away at Perl code. In order to wrap my mind around the win9x problem (remember, it's something that two tier 2 quality tech support people couldn't fix), I had to dump all of my cached data about the code I was working on from my short term memory to make room. When I got back to the code, I would have to rebuild my problem solving information cache back close to the state it was before the call, because I'd need that information again to continue where I left off. This would usually take 1-15 minutes depending on the complexity of the call and the familiarity of the program. Given that lots of people would call me about lots of stuff, I figure that sometimes I lost at least 1-2 hours of working time per day.
If only I wasn't pulling triple duty as a sysadmin, programer, and tier 3 support... but that's another story.
I find that if I can switch between tasks (provided it doesn't require huge swapping) I work better because I can keep interested and not get bored of one particular task that just goes on and on. If I have a couple of little jobs that I can quickly complete and feel satisfied about completing them, I feel better because I'm not just working on the mammoth project that's going to take 3 months. Also I find that in life in general I schedule my time a lot better when I'm busy, out of necessity. Last year, when I was doing uni full time, two jobs, and three amateur theatre productions in one semester, I wasted very little of my time because I couldn't afford to.
What, me worry?
Women are great at multi-tasking. They can iron, watch tv, mind the kids and still find time to tell you all the things you have done wrong in the last two weeks.