Work On One Thing At A Time. Here's Why.

I seem to be hard-wired to try to work on more than one thing at a time.

It's one of the reasons I like to work in a Scrum of Kanban fashion - I'm forced to work on one thing at a I time.

But is working on one thing at a time really such a big deal?

You have two jobs

Let's set this up.

You have two things to do. Each requires five day's work.

You have two choices basic choices.

You can work on both tasks together. Or you can pick one, work on it until completion... then start on the other task.

Let's get a little more scientific and add some numbers.

Each task requires FIVE day's work.

Each block here represents half a day - 10 blocks in total for each task.

For the concurrent let's say that you work on one task in the morning, and the other task in the afternoon.

For the sequential case, we'll work on task A for 5 days, then on task B for 5 days.

Those are our two basic cases.

What's the same?

The first thing we can say is that - one way or the other - you have completed two tasks in 10 days.

That's what's the same.

The are THREE ways that the two approaches differ - and I'd be surprised if you've thought of all of them:

1. Financial

Let's attach some value to the work you're doing. Each of the task provides you with income of one thousand pounds.

Which means you get £2000 at the end.

Or £1000 here and here.

These are very different financial positions.

While you're working , you're likely to be spending money. Your working capital declines for 10 days, then gets topped up at the end.

Compare that with the sequential case. That's half the working capital.

2. Discovery and learning

It sounds a little counter-intuitive, but working on two tasks together limits the opportunities for one to benefit from the experience of doing the other.

But if you take Task A and work on it until completion, EVERYTHING that you learned from the experience can be carried over to task B.

In the extreme case, you may discover that Task B is no longer required.

3. Context Switching

So far, we've been looking at an idealised case, where a 5 day task takes 5 days.

I'm going to come right out and say it: I can't do a 5 day task in days.

That's because it take me while to get warmed up. To get going.

Truth be told, it takes me a while to get going every day.

But what if I'm working on two tasks?

Every day, I'm coming back to a task that I haven't worked on for a significant period of time.

Worse, my mind has been occupied with something entirely different.

It's going to take a while to work out where I'd got to... and to get going again.

Adding in all the time for these "context switches"

we can see that under real world conditions, it takes less time to work on one task at a time that to work on two tasks concurrently.

Chime in

Those are three reasons to work on one task at a time.

Do YOU have any others?

Or perhaps you have a good reason to work on two or more task at the same time.

Either way, let me know in the comments.