Work Plans Must Account for Project Friction
Excessive task switching greatly impairs productivity. Build such friction into your estimates and commitments.
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I overheard this conversation at work one day:
Manager Shannon: “Jamie, I know you’re doing the usability assessments on the Canary project right now. Several other projects are also interested in usability assessments. How much time do you spend on that?”
Team Member Jamie: “About eight hours a week.”
Manager Shannon: “Okay, so you could work with five projects at a time then.”
Do you see any flaws in Shannon’s thinking? Five times eight is forty, the nominal hours in a work week, so this discussion seems reasonable on the surface. But Shannon hasn’t considered the many factors that reduce the time that individuals have available each day for project work: project friction (as opposed to interpersonal friction, which I’m not discussing here).
There’s a difference between elapsed hours on the job and effective available hours. If people don’t incorporate friction factors into their planning, they’ll forever underestimate how long it will take to get work done. This article expands on Lesson #23 from my book Software Development Pearls: “Work plans must account for friction.”
Task Switching and Flow
People do not multitask — they task switch. When multitasking computers switch from one job to another, there’s a period of unproductive time during the switch. The same is true of people, only it’s far worse. It takes a little while to gather all the materials you need to work on a different activity, access the right files, and reload your brain with the pertinent information. You need to change your mental context to focus on the new problem and remember where you were the last time you worked on it. That’s the slow part.
Some people are better at task switching than others. Maybe I have a short attention span, but I’m pretty good at diverting my focus to something different and then resuming the original activity right where I left off. For many people, though, excessive task switching destroys productivity. Programmers are particularly susceptible to…
