MANAGING MULTITASKING
Maximize your teams efficiency by limiting multitasking.
In today’s office environment multitasking has become the new normal. Job description of most offices jobs read, in part something like this, “must be able to work at a fast pace and good at multitasking”.
The research suggests that while humans can multitask, women better than men, (switch from task to task quickly, or task switching) the cost is a loss of efficiency. The American Psychological Association suggests that as much as 40% of productive time could be wasted due to multitasking. This magnitude of productivity loss may even occur with a few number of tasks. Gerald Weinberg in his article, Quality Software Management: Systems Thinking, suggests that adding a single task could cause a loss of 20% of productive time spent on a task.
Using a Kanban board allows teams to limit multitasking by allowing team members to focus on a limited number of tasks at once even if dozens of tasks are in queue. The the team members as availability to focus on another tasks, s/he pulls another from the queue and begins working. If work on a particular task is blocked, s/he can place the task back in the queue and pick another task. As work and time are available, the team member is responsibility to decide when they are able to give a task attention and focus.
Making task switching deliberate by using a Kanban board makes team members more aware when multitasking and task switching is occurring and they can work to reduce it.
Teams that use Kanban board and allows them to focus on limited tasks at a time and focus on getting those tasks done rather piling on more unfinished tasks. This changes the mentality of the team from “being busy” to getting things done.
Teams that don’t manage multitasking:
- Are always swamped but not productive
- feel burned out and overwhelmed
- Do not have any capacity for change or new tasks
- Inefficient
- Maybe slower than other teams with similar tasks