I’m reminded by a comment made by a neurobiologist that got similar reactions to my posts on multitasking. She said, “Pot makes you stupid.” Of course, pot smokers reacted with arguments about long-term effects, contrasts to other recreational pursuits, etc. I followed the argument and her responses. I’ll make some parallel points.

> Multitasking is an choice.
> Multitasking is a habit.
> Multitasking is a coping mechanism.
> Multitasking diminishes performance in the short term.
> Multitasking has a cumulative negative effects in our life.
> Multitasking can lead to more serious negative consequences.

I’m not equating pot smoking with multitasking. I am saying that the prevalence of multitasking in our lives doesn’t make it an acceptable practice. Do the referenced exercise to examine for yourself the negative consequences. Make a choice to minimize switch-tasking. Begin a practice of starting work that is in a condition to be finished. And if you are a project manager, reduce the batch sizes of the work that people are doing. The smaller the batch the less opportunity there’ll be to switch-task.

After responding to your multi-tasking exercise post, and looking at some of your additional references, I think that we’re probably not really in disagreement, but I still think that there’s a lot of value in being more precise in our collective thinking on “multi-tasking”, and in the way that we communicate about it with stakeholders.

If you walk into a room and say “multi-tasking is evil and makes you stupid”, the people (including me) in the room who routinely and successfully balance multiple projects/jobs/children without feeling stupid may look at you like you’re a bit slow in the head, because it’s too broad and simplistic a statement (for the reasons that i stated in my response to your earlier post).

Can we hone in on it a bit more finely? Can we talk about slicing tasks more finely so that resources won’t be tempted to switch mid-task? Can we talk about adding explicit project time for context-switching for resources tasked to multiple projects? Can we talk about multi-tasking as a phenomena that impacts Risk and delivery time and which should be factored in to planning, rather than supposing that it’s something which could ever be eliminated?