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Multitasking As An Opportunity Wasting Behavior

Multitasking is common in product development and other organizations. But I claim it's a behavior that often causes us to waste the business and other opportunities that we recognize and want to exploit. In this article I present a simple Gantt chart that supports this claim.

In a previous post I suggested that I thought it would be useful to begin building a catalog of common behaviors within businesses that either caused opportunities to be wasted, or caused opportunities to be more fully exploited.

I called these behaviors "Opportunity Wasting Behaviors (OWBs)" and "Opportunity Exploiting Behaviors (OEBs)."

In that post, I suggested that multitasking is an example of a Opportunity Wasting Behavior. In this post, I want to discuss my understanding of the mechanism by which multitasking typically causes (business) opportunities to be wasted.

At a high level, multitasking can cause opportunities to be wasted by causing product (or service) development to take longer than would otherwise be necessary. As a result, the company is not able to fully exploit the opportunity.

Note, this assumes that the opportunity only exists for some finite period of time. That is, we assume that in order to exploit an opportunity the company has to respond with its product or service (its "offer") within the temporal confines of a "market window."

For example, consider a company that makes accessories for MP3 players. Before the Apple iPod was introduced there was no market for iPod accessories. When the iPod was hot, the market for iPod accessories was also hot. As the iPod wanes in popularity, however, so does the market for iPod accessories.

So, if we agree that opportunities can be wasted when the creation of a company's offer takes too long, let's look at multitasking in more detail. How does multitasking inflate development times?

Effects of Multitasking The figure on the right is a screenshot from a demo version of the Merlin project management software. Please have a look at this figure now.

From the figure, notice that there are two sub-projects. The first, summarized in row 1, shows a project ("Without Multitasking") that is planned to take 30 days to complete.

The second sub-project is named "With Multitasking." It is summarized in row 6. It is also planned to take 30 days to complete.

So here we have a first observation: Multitasking, by itself, doesn't increase the total time required to complete a given *set* of projects.

(Note that I'm assuming "task switches" are instantaneous. Of course, this isn't reality, but time-consuming task switches would only make the case against multitasking stronger, so no harm is done by making this assumption.)

So if multitasking doesn't increase the total time required to complete a given set of projects, what is there to carp about? What's the big deal?

The big deal is that while the total time required to complete a set of projects isn't increased, the time required to complete every individual project is increased when multitasking is present.

Have a look at the figure again. When multitasking is present, the time required to complete Project A is increased by 10 days (from 15 days to 25 days.) The time required to complete Project B is also increased by 10 days. Both projects took longer to complete.

Why?

The answer is that projects only move closer to completion when we actually work on them. I know, this is a startling conclusion, but it's true!

When we are multiasking, we have the sense that we have more tasks "in progress" than when we are not multitasking. In reality, we have more tasks "open" or "started" but not "in progress."

Look again at Figure 1. Can you find any interval where work is being done on more than one task?

The answer, of course, is no. In the example, whenever Project A is being worked, Project B is standing still. And whenever B is making progress, A is stalled.

So the net effect is that both projects take longer to complete.

If a project could be "making progress" when no one was working on it then the situation would be different. If a project or process has some kind of "cook time" associated with it we must be more careful in our analysis. (But I still wouldn't immediately jump to the conclusion that multitasking wasn't harmful, even in that situation.)

But in knowledge-work companies, how many projects are "making progress" when no one is working on them? Not many, in my experience.

So, lets cut to the chase.

Multitasking increases the time required to complete projects and by so doing it puts us at great risk of missing the "market windows" associated with the various business opportunities we recognize.

For this reason, we should be concerned that multitasking in our organizations is very likely to be an Opportunity Wasting Behavior.