This Focused Performance Weblog started life as a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective, but is in the process of evolving towards primary content on interactive and mobile marketing. Think of it as about Focusing marketing messages for enhanced Performance. If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
"...but does that mean you really have a choice? The research is intriguing. What I'd like to see next is some advice about making good choices about what and when to multitask and when and how to go after flow...I sure don't expect to get back to a world where I have the unfettered freedom to always single thread."
Alright, absolute single-tasking is probably utopian, but in the real world of organization efforts, aka projects, the bulk of really debilitating, capacity and throughput destroying multi-tasking can be dealt with through effective project management. As I wrote on March 13, andelsewhere, if project management is to be seen as an answer, the primary question is "What should I be working on?" Effective project management makes sure that...
1) Resources are not pressured to multi-task by overfilled in-boxes, by synchronizing the launch of projects with the ability of the system of resources to take them on, and
2) There are clear priorities, or better yet, there is a process to determine a clear priority for the use of a resource's single-tasking time when s/he has a choice of tasks to work. Note that this is not necessarily based on some questionable and ever-changing "priority of project," but more appropriately a priority based on the relative health of project promises at the point in time in question.
This doesn't create a perfect world of uninterupted single-tasking, but once in place, the benefits of striving for single-tasking become apparent to all involved, including the less-stressed resources and the managers surprised by the enhanced reliability and throughput of project completions.
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