Task-Switching Is Making Us Miserable. Here’s Why

I recently sat down on a Saturday morning to review my work’s progress over the past week. As I reviewed the time-blocks in my calendar, an unsettling reality struck me. It had taken me nearly three times the amount of time I’d planned to complete a key task. 

A particularly striking revelation upon reviewing my calendar was how fragmented the time spent on this critical task had been. Incoming requests, logistic tasks, ad hoc discussions with colleagues and of course meetings had all swallowed up large chunks of time forcing me to crowbar my key activity into thirty to forty minute slots scattered throughout the week.

This got me thinking about the way we set up our time in organisational settings. Ultimately, we want our specialist workers – anyone with a specialist knowledge of a subject such as a psychologist, physician, engineer or technical manager – to focus on the work associated with their specific areas of expertise to provide value. But in practice what happens is a forced task-switching between this work and supporting or emerging work.

The Myth of Multi-Tasking 

We’ve all been there. We’ve gone through a workday multi-tasking and feeling hyper productive as we jump from task to task. Or we’ve actually tried to sit down to do a single task but have found that for one reason or another we’ve had to jump from task to task. The result is that we get to the end of a workday with six different tasks partially complete, but nothing completely done, leaving us with the sense of dissatisfaction we all know too well.

The harsh reality is that multi-tasking doesn’t work. Or rather, it doesn’t exist. 

I won’t go deep into the pitfalls of multi-tasking here as others have articulated this far better than I can, but the bottom line is worth emphasising and repeating – Task-switching causes us to spend longer on tasks and make more mistakes. When you’re working on a task that requires deep concentration and large stretches of uninterrupted time, task-switching and disturbances are like kryptonite to your productivity and the quality of your work.

Induced Multi-tasking: The Insidious Effects

Assuming we’ve bought into the idea that multi-tasking is indeed counterproductive, it’s worth asking the question - why do so many knowledge workers do it? In organisational settings, far too often we find that this is related to culture and systems of working, or lack thereof.

On any given day, we can find a specialist worker having to work on a crucial report – something they’re specialised to do which contributes to a company’s bottom line - and having to manage an incoming stream of email, instant messaging and ad hoc requests. The specialist worker is often left with little choice but to engineer and manage a dual stream of attention of sorts. You want to finish that report, but not replying to emails or attending meetings or helping others with requests would make you seem like a bit of a grouch, or worse – unhelpful and lazy. As Cal Newport writes in his latest book A World Without Email, “to say no to any one of these requests in isolation makes you seem curmudgeonly or lazy. But the sum total of many such simple requests leads you to become constantly overwhelmed by everything that has to get done”.

I’m all too familiar with this feeling of overwhelm. The overwhelm borne from an ever-growing set of open loops that remain unresolved. And it turns out the psychology at play here has a name – the Zeigarnik Effect, which is our human tendency to remember incomplete and interrupted tasks over tasks that have been completed. What ensues is a franticness that emerges in everything we do as we try to address each request or open loop as quickly as possible. As our brains look for and crave closure, our ability to focus on the task at hand is impeded, leading to poorer performance and more mistakes.

The other end of the spectrum presents a scenario whereby the can keeps getting kicked so far down the road that eventually we run out of runway, making a crucial task that requires critical and clear thinking another fire-fighting scenario managed under extreme pressure to avoid a catastrophe. 

In short, we’re spending more and more time on the urgent-but-not-important instead of the important-but-not-urgent where quality and breakthroughs happen. The result is a cycle of fire-fighting and frantic busyness. We’ve become busy and frazzled instead of calm and effective.

But what if there was a solution?

Protected Time, Visible Work and Meeting Quotas

As with most things related to collaborative work and multiple moving parts, there isn’t a one size fits all solution. But there are working principles that can work for different scenarios depending on your type of work. 

A. Negotiate periods of protected time. If you’re someone who has to switch between focussed work and less focussed work such as management like I do, you can negotiate periods of protected time. I’ve been lucky enough to have a boss who’s allowed me to negotiate these periods of undistracted time, by either working remotely or simply agreeing that “he’ll stop bothering me” unless something critical comes up. A key component of this is the recognition of the key specialist outputs we want at the end of a given period of time. Amongst our team, we set these target outputs at the beginning of each week, so that any agreement for a period of undistracted focussed time is in line with these targets.

B. Make your work visible within the groups you work. This simply means making it clear – visually – what each member of the team is working on and within what context. Not only does this provide clarity, which drives effectiveness, motivation and productivity, it allows any skew in the workload of any one team member immediately visible. When something is visible it can then be managed. And making something like workload visible reaps multiple rewards from guarding against burnout to identifying bottlenecks in workflows. And ultimately that “one last request” can be seen within the context of a bigger picture.

C. Introduce friction to setting up meetings. Usually less friction and more convenience is a positive thing. But this might not be the case when it comes to meetings, specifically online meetings. Most of us who work within an organisational environment are all too familiar with a whole day that’s been hijacked by meetings. We’re familiar with the scenario of attending a meeting only to find that our input is only required for a fraction of time, or worse not at all. But as with individual ad hoc requests, an individual meeting request is hard to decline when viewed in isolation. When viewed as part of a larger context however, the perception changes. If an engineer is hired to produce highly specialised outputs that impact directly on the progress of a design project for example, the request to spend 50% of a work week in meetings can be evaluated against the whole context of the workweek – simply said, it become difficult to justify. Agreeing a meeting quota with your team is a potential solution to this. If a quota is agreed amongst the key members of the team, requesting someone to attend that one last meeting over and above their meeting quota forces you to really consider the relevance and importance of that request.

A Vision of Stress-Free Work

Whilst the utopia of a stress-free work environment is highly unlikely – it might not even be the best to optimise for – we can strive for less frantic workflows and schedules. We can carve out more time for our critical tasks before these morph into emergencies and damage limitation scenarios.

The ideas discussed above aren’t exhaustive. Admittedly many are from personal experience of what’s worked and what hasn’t worked for me. As a person who often switches roles between manager and maker, I’m hoping these can start a bigger conversation around the way do work and the way we manage work.

Overwhelm and fire-fighting don’t need to be synonymous with work. But we do need to start questioning how we’re spending our time. Are we making an impact? Or are we just busy?