About Dan Markovitz
Dan Markovitz is the founder and president of TimeBack Management. Prior to founding his own firm, Mr. Markovitz held management positions at Sierra Designs, Adidas, CNET and Asics Tiger. Learn More...
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Leveling; smoothing out the flow; e.g., doing two performance evaluations a day for 3 weeks, rather than ten a day for three days -- and then needing to take a vacation because you're so burned out.
Overburdening people, process, or equipment; e.g., people working 100 hour weeks for months on end -- come to think of it, like most lawyers and accountants.
Uneveness or variability; e.g., leaving work at the normal time on Thursday, but having to stay at the office till midnight on Friday because the boss finally got around to giving you that project...at 4:30pm.
Waste; activities that your customer doesn't value and doesn't want to pay for; e.g., billing your customer for the really expensive 10am FedEx delivery because you didn't finish the document on time.
TIMEBACK BLOG 
Standard work and the folly of multitasking.
Posted August 31, 2009 @ 9:24 PM
I've been harping on this for a long time, but since there's new information I figure that it's worth saying again: multitasking doesn't work. The latest blow to that myth is from researchers at Stanford University:
People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found. "They're suckers for irrelevancy," said communication Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers. "Everything distracts them."
Further tests showed that compared to light multitaskers, heavy multitaskers perform worse on memory tests because they're struggling to retain more information in their brains at any given time. And in a beautiful display of irony, heavy multitaskers suck at switching between tasks:
"They couldn't help thinking about the task they weren't doing. The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can't keep things separate in their minds."
In fact, the heavy multitaskers were inferior in all ways:
Eyal Ophir, the study’s lead investigator and a researcher at Stanford’s Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab, said: “We kept looking for multitaskers’ advantages in this study. But we kept finding only disadvantages. We thought multitaskers were very much in control of information. It turns out, they were just getting it all confused.”
Now, imagine if in your efforts to eradicate waste at work you identify a work process that was clearly inefficient. Maybe it's the way an operator reaches for a part. Or perhaps it's the kind of form someone in accounting fills out for travel reimbursements. If you're worth your lean salt, you'd try to find a way to eliminate the waste in the process. You'd create standard work and establish benchmarks, and then you'd run experiments to find a better way to do the job.
And yet we never do this kind of analysis for the way that knowledge workers manage the flow of information they deal with. Multitasking is a way of life for these folks, as they check their Blackberries in the middle of meetings, reply to emails while working on new product development, and in general expect (and are expected) to drop everything whenever someone comes by with a question.
But this isn't the best way to operate, as evidenced by this Stanford study (and many others). So why do we tolerate gross inefficiency among these workers, at the same time that we take arms against a sea of inefficiency in all other arenas of the company? Some people argue that eradicating this waste won't "move the needle." They want to focus on the 38 days it takes to generate a quote, or the $3 million in scrap and rework -- that's where the money is, they say. But who has the time and the mental bandwidth to take on the 38 days and the $3 million in scrap if they're constantly undermining their own ability to process and analyze incoming information?
My challenge to you is this: seriously examine the way that your highly paid knowledge workers process the information that flows to them and benchmark performance. Create standardized work, and then try to improve it. See if you can find a better way.
My guess is that you can -- and without too much difficulty. All you need to do is let go of the fallacy that multitasking is an efficient way to work.
Responses to your comments
Submitted by dan on Tue, 2009-10-06 15:25.
Veteran Manager: I totally agree that you'll have to handle more than one issue at a time. However, there's a difference between managing several projects concurrently and trying to do two things at once, and it's the latter habit that should be stopped. If you're working with R&D at 10am, then work with R&D at 10am -- don't start taking phone calls and answering emails from Marketing. Do that at 11am.
Kathleen: it's amazing how easy it is to spot the lack of standard work in others, or in external processes, but how invisible it is in the way we process information. I've just completed an A3 examining my own work and it was shocking to me just how much I vary from my self-defined standards.
Chris: the instinct to program repetitive work is something that comes so naturally to programmers! For those of us who are English majors, it's not quite so innate (sadly).
multitasking
Submitted by veteran manager (not verified) on Mon, 2009-10-05 20:39.
The study certainly has come up with a different perspective but not a realistic assessment. Managers have always been required to juggle a lot of information and each manager has found his own technique to do so. My experience ( paint manufacturing with daily interaction with onsite R&D and Marketing)sees our managers able to effectively juggle simultaneous launches of new products from inception thru production to commerce.
The reality is: "If you can't juggle, the business finds a new juggler". An saying I recall from a CEO on measuring performance: There are managers(people) who get things done and those that don't.
In a business world where cost control is under the microscope and resources are not always available, I don't see this changing. There is no alternative than to learn to juggle.
I feel so stupid now
Submitted by Kathleen Fasanella (not verified) on Mon, 2009-09-21 16:30.
~knocking head on the desk~
I'm more than familiar with standard work and will blather upon its necessity with anyone I can trip and sit upon but until I read this, it never occurred to me that the brilliance of standard work was due to the elimination of multi-tasking. One, two, connect the dots, duh, I don't know where my head was at. Thanks!
standardized work?
Submitted by Chris Mahan (not verified) on Mon, 2009-09-21 05:14.
on the sentence: "Create standardized work, and then try to improve it." My reaction as a programmer is: If I do anything more than once, I automate it with a computer program (sometimes I don't even do it once. I just program it.)
Then I use these programs together to create automated workflows.
Yes, I'll occasionally review these and tear-down-rebuild better.
As far as writing down how to program, that's much harder to do. It's somewhat akin to writing down how to write well. You can a couple of pages of rules on grammar, etc, but that won't make the writing be good. It really requires focused human intelligence.
I just saw a news report on
Submitted by Chris Berlin (not verified) on Tue, 2009-09-15 14:25.
I just saw a news report on TV that explained how students in a VA school are using Iphones in place of books to save costs, have live updates, etc.
The teacher promoted this as a great way to teach multitasking and was excited that her students were engaged in this activity.
The video showed the kids heads down not interacting with anyone!
Now, imagine if in your
Submitted by wózki widłowe (not verified) on Sat, 2009-09-05 12:34.
Now, imagine if in your efforts to eradicate waste at work you identify a work process that was clearly inefficient. Maybe it's the way an operator reaches for a part. Or perhaps it's the kind of form someone in accounting fills out for travel reimbursements. : thanks a lot
The study certainly has come
The study certainly has come up with a different perspective but not a realistic assessment. Managers have always been required to juggle a lot of information and each manager has found his own technique to do so. My experience ( paint manufacturing with daily interaction with onsite R&D and Marketing)sees our managers able to effectively juggle simultaneous launches of new products from inception thru production to commerce. The reality is: "If you can't juggle, the business finds a new juggler". An saying I recall from a CEO on 646-003 exam measuring performance: There are managers(people) who get things done and those that don't.