multitasking is a myth

My thinking is this: we start too much and finish too little.

Fact: you can only really work on one thing at a time.

Multitasking is a myth. Literally. “But my computer does multitasking,” you say. Elaborate ruse. Your computer is actually switching–very, very quickly–between separate processes. Because it’s a computer, and because it’s designed to do all that, and because it has a massive amount of fast-access memory, it reduces switching costs to almost nothing.

You are not a computer. You can’t switch that fast.

Suppose you have two tasks. Each takes you 4 hours to do. How much total time will it take you to finish both?

8 hours is not the answer.

If you do first one, then the other, it will take you 4 hours, plus whatever amount of time it takes you to switch from one to the other, then another 4 hours. At best, it will take you 8 hours plus a little.

If you switch from one to the other after every hour, it will take you 1 hour, plus a little, then 1 hour, plus a little, then 1 hour, and so on. The more you switch tasks, the more it costs to finish.

I once mentioned to a former colleague that I preferred working on one project at a time. “That’s not the way we work here,” he responded disdainfully. “We multitask a lot. Better get used to it.”

Is it any wonder that this individual–and this company, for that matter–never finished a single project or product on time? And that what did get churned out suffered from so much feature creep and additional complexity that it never satisfied its original design goals?

You don’t always have the option to finish what you started. But don’t think that it doesn’t cost you.