One way to lessen the chance for conflict is to proactively let that person know your priorities, progress, etc.

And if they explode?

I do think multitasking is a skill and can be used successfully but I agree with you and find that it blocks the road to learning ultimately more useful skills.

I also believe it acts as a shield, protecting ever more stressed and fretted workers from having to take full responsibility. Fitting in todays society with the economy in doubt and job security a fair bit more shaky than it has been for a good few years.

I think there are often other nuances to why we multitask.

I personally like to have 2-3 projects on the go at any one time. It helps me a lot to switch tasks occaisionally and clear my mind so I can come back fresh to a problem later in the day / week. In this case, multitasking does mean I make more progress overall.

Likewise, I’m sometimes blocked waiting for input from someone else, so having something else to switch to helps me maintain momentum. (If I had a single project, I’d probably go and hassle the person I’m waiting on and hence slow us both down…)

I also learn from having multiple projects: it’s amazing how often something I’m doing for one project gives insight into a problem on another project. This even happens across apparently very different projects.

That said, I do see a lot of organisations multitasking to avoid conflict, so there’s a lot of truth in what you say.

Cheers,
Graham

If you do 6 tasks simultaneously, and each takes 1 day to do, then you won’t complete any of them until after 6 days.

In fact, it will probably take longer than this if you multitask as it takes time to get started working on something different. You might need to walk to a different building or boot up a different computer. As well as trying to explain priorities to those people who give you your tasks, it’s also important to think about how you can reduce the time to get started on something different.

This rationale mirrors the rationale for multitasking OSs. Multitasking ALWAYS imposes overhead to queue and choose the next work, and to manage the context switch. The appeal of a multitasking OS was essentially twofold: to put wasted and latent cycles to work, improving real-world throughput, and to reduce apparent latency in user-interactive tasks (which are inherently bursty).

Humans experience similar factors in load management, so similar strategies, scaled appropriately (in hope, anyway) are frequently appropriate.

Graham’s further point is very important specifically for humans. Machines don’t improve their answers by allowing the process to “marinate” in queue overnight. People frequently do. In this case, multitasking is leveraged to achieve a BENEFIT from additional latency. A further potential benefit to humans is cross-fertilization of ideas and a broader understanding of a system, in consequence of multitasking. Well, sometimes.

It sounds to me as though we all multitask to some degree, whether we like it or not. Awareness of what we do and why may allow us to reduce losses to the practice and increase gains from it.

If, down the road, some problem arises, that’s not too important, because: PEOPLE HAVE LOW EXPECTATIONS about delivery, compared to their expectations about talk.

Furthermore, multi-tasking is unavoidable in the realm of asynchronous cooperation. Email comes to me every hour of every day. A lot of it carries requests or expectations of some reaction on my part.