You raise an interesting argument, that (if I understand correctly) avoiding multi-tasking results in increased costs due to the need to delay progress on high priority activities.

Although multi-tasking is seen by many people as a way of life, it is mostly regarded (at least by TOC advocates) as the biggest contributing factor for late projects.

The reason multi-tasking results in negative impact on projects is because in practical terms multi-tasking means that work on one task is stopped, before this task is complete, and attention is shifted to working on another task. Work on this new task, is also abandoned after a while, in lieu of work on either the first task or a brand new task.

There is ample evidence to suggest that the act of stopping and starting tasks cause major inefficiencies, as each time a task is resumed some time is lost on determining where the task was left at and what needs to be done next.

Another point, relevant to the argument you raise, relates to the issue of task priorities. If high priority tasks get delayed because the resources required to execute them do not multi-task that could mean one of two things:

1. The delayed tasks are of a lower priority than the currently attended to task – in which case the cost of their delay should be of lesser importance than the one currently done; or
2. The delayed tasks are of a higher priority than the currently attended to task – in which case they should have been attended to in the first place.

Just to make the above points slightly clearer – according to the TOC, completing tasks on time is not as important as ensuring that the project as a whole is finished on time. In that context resource allocation to tasks should be based on the relative impact that their allocation will have on the project delivery timeline as a whole, rather than the impact that will have on individual tasks. If two projects compete on a single resource, where the availability, or otherwise, of that resource will affect the project’s completion date, multi-tasking will not only not resolve the issue but will result in both projects being late, rather than just one of them.

Cheers, Shim.

Consider having critical bug submitted to some old system you maintain while all your developers work on new project which has very tight schedule. You can avoid multitasking but you risk serious injury on your relation with one of your customers. It can be calculated in dollars. In this situation you’d most likely weigh choose to fix the bug because cost of multitasking for a while will be much smaller than avoiding context switching.

To Multitask, or not to multitask [link to post] #projectmanagement

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RT @sara_broca To Multitask, or not to multitask [link to post] #projectmanagement

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