We all know that multi-tasking as a concept does not work but we continue to see its use with examples of people 33% allocated to some task. I typically use the example of Shylock's request for a pound of flesh in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Vince to highlight that you can’t have part of a person so why do we persist in allocating people on this basis?

There is an obvious reason with a lack of appropriate skills but we can use a multi-level kanban board to help with prioritisation and allocation so people are not required to multitask. But I don’t think it is that simple and I think there is an insidious reason is most of the people making the allocations don’t understand the concept of ‘flow’ and rarely experience it in their own work.

Flow is a concept explored by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly in the 1970s and is described as “effortless attention”. It is when we are engaged in a task and in that state of flow that cost change takes the most mental toll as we need to disengage and refocus on another task. 

The reason that managers don’t understand or appreciate this is that they rarely experience it as they are normally involved in discussion or decisioning and not the work itself. We see this highlighted in Drucker’s statement that is made in the 1950s that in a knowledge economy the workers know more than the managers. This means that they have no idea of the cost of switching tasks and how ineffective it can make an individual and a team.

I recall one example of senior manager complaining at a conference that his people were taking so long to complete simple tasks. What he did not understand that having set a target of 100% loading (recovery) for is people all of them had more than one project on the go at the same time and some had five.

The overhead of taking on the coordination of the tasks is what compromised his people. Really he should have addressed this and ensured that they could focus on one thing and ensure his managers managed the coordination by prioritisation.

Fast Company posted about a similar issue here which uses "deep work" and "shallow work" which is referenced in one of the other blogs.