One thing

A few years ago, multitasking was the thing. It was the soft skill every person and company was looking for, or so it seemed to me.

So I read lots of articles on the subject: how to multitask, multitasking at work, multi-multi-tasking, multi-multi-multi… okay, you got it, but I never understood the point of doing many things at once.

I felt uncomfortable with the idea of constantly changing my focus, as if doing so many things at once meant that you couldn’t get any of them right in the end.

Now I firmly believe that we are not capable of true multitasking, like the one of computers; we are only capable of doing one thing at a time.

Of course we can’t always choose our tasks and their timing, but we can choose the method of getting the job done.

Speaking for myself, I need to allocate blocks of time to tasks and reduce distractions and mind switching as much as possible.

I read an article from Carnegie Mellon University’s research about the phenomenon of “Context Switching” in the DevOps context, which is the process that occurs when a person, working on many projects, has to switch focus multiple times.

It estimates that every time you switch context, you waste 20% of your cognitive capacity, because you have to pick up the thread. This is a large amount of time. Working on 5 projects, for example, leaves only 10% of your time available for real work.

This statement pretty much translates what I feel when I am working on many projects, but I hope not to fall into the confirmation bias.

Reducing the amount of projects sometimes it’s easy, sometimes not, sometimes you just can’t. Since we don’t always have control over this, to get things done we need to prioritise projects, time-boxing our days, and focus on what we are doing, reducing interruption as much as possible.

I also see constant feedback crucial to the success of a project, it helps to prioritise and to keep the project on track, reducing the waste of time.

Establishing a recurring feedback loop ensures that the effort is optimised based on the goal and it also makes the stakeholder - and sometimes we are our stakeholders - aware of real delivery time and task overlapping, letting them assign the right priorities, thus reducing, hopefully, the number of active projects or reviewing the deadlines.

I work on several personal projects in my free time - I’m one of my stakeholders - and I find that time-boxing life outside the office is harder, but I am trying to. Sometimes it just means delaying to the future my personal side projects, because the ones about home and family have priority, or constantly switching project based on the time available, reducing my efficiency and my speed of completing a project.

Even writing this simple post required me more time than needed.

I started writing it days ago in my spare time, switching between different activities, because I was afraid that if I waited until I had the time to devote entirely to writing, I probably would not have even started it to this day.

I also think it's not just a matter of time, but opportunity cost related to that time. One of my goals this year, is to write more, so I was able to give this post, the priority it needed. Whether anyone will ever read this article is another matter entirely.