I’ve always wondered just how productive people are when trying to juggle three or more projects. How about attending 6 meetings a day?
Well now I don’t have to wonder anymore, because Bruce Henry over at Bruce’s Brain has laid it out for me in his post Multi-Tasking is Killing Your Business. Brilliant. Statistically sound. Perfectly understandable.
At my most recent permanent gig, I was managing five projects, with nine employees across the board, and was about to be given a sixth project and a part-time employee when I bailed. Most of those employees were working on multiple software releases, trying to keep track of which stream went into which release, and which features were included in which stream. You get the picture.
Chaos. Utter madness.
For the solo entrepreneur, it’s a fine balance, isn’t it? You want to focus on one project at a time, but you also need to get more business, which is a completely different function in itself. As a consequence, most of us end up spending too much time thrashing: on the project, getting new business, getting people to pay, finding all of our receipts, or any other number of time killing, and often non-billable tasks.
I like Bruce’s finding: focus on a single prioritized list of tasks. Don’t bother trying to multi-task. Just focus on each priority item, one at a time until you’re done. Looking back over a year of doing so, you’ll no doubt find that you were more productive than ever. I suspect you might even find other benefits to this approach:
- Higher quality results
- Less rework
- Faster completion per project
- More work from existing customers
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