Concurrent Active Tasks

If a single person can’t even focus on completing one thing at a time, what are the chances of the whole team being able to collaborate and do so?

Hello,

In addition to what Ian said (and Ian, if you know more about this, please share), I would like to propose a reflection regarding something that has been in vogue for quite a while now, which is multitasking. It is usually seen as a great ability by recruiters and something to add on the first lines of the CV / résumé.

What this Dev Team member is doing is multitasking to increase his or her productivity, but is he really improving anything? There are many scientific researches that prove that by multitasking, we waste time when we switch from one activity to another. The more activities and the more switching, the more we waste time.

On a personal note, I also like to "get in the flow" when I'm at a task and it simply can't happen if I need to keep dividing my attention and effort into different things every few minutes.

Jeff Sutherland also mentions that in his book "Scrum twice the work in half the time". I can't remember of the top of my head right now, but with 5 different activities, the loss of attention gets to around 70%!

Cheers,

Demerson

Thanks guys for the inputs...Seems to me that at the end of the day, it will summarize into multi-tasking, which is not recommended. In case a task gets "blocked", I guess we could open an "issue", to reflect that the task is blocked and then possibly start a new task while the blocker for Test A is being looked into. However only go back to task A, once you finish the task you have assigned to you...

In summary, work at one task at a time, right?

Thanks again guys!

Here's a great agile game to teach the team about multi-tasking and the impacts: 

https://www.crisp.se/gratis-material-och-guider/multitasking-name-game

In addition to what is being said above, 

Say there are conditions where either a task is blocked due to dependency as you mentioned then I believe there is no harm in starting another task and as you said blocked task must be given highest priority once its unblocked.

Having said that there has to be limit on number of tasks that can go in blocked state or number of tasks in progress at a time for a team member, you can set WIP limits to tackle that.

Sometimes by picking up another task we try to cover up the problem because of which the first task is blocked. The problem should be highlighted and the entire team/organisation should swarm in removing the blocker. Toyota Production System follows the Andon Cord practice, please Google it.

By picking up another task we start working on a lower value item as the higher value item has been blocked.

Regarding the perils of multi-tasking, I often cite the following percentages of productivity loss due to context-switching (supported by many scientific studies):

• When a person is able to focus on one item, their productivity is near 100%
• When a person has to divide their time/attention between two items, they will spend about 20% of their time "context-switching" (i.e. - remembering where they left off, getting back into "the flow", etc.).   That translates to 80% of a person's productivity, or only 40% to each task (as opposed to the 50% / 50% that is popular in many traditional planning approaches)
• When a person is working on three concurrent items, they will lose another 20% of their productivity to context-switching and trying to keep track of three distinct tasks.   This means that their actual "productivity" will dip to 60%, with 40% "wasted" on context-switching
• If a person tries to work on 4 distinct tasks at the same time, add another 20% of lost productivity to context-switching.   That means they will be spending over half of their productivity (60%) simply switching from one task to another, and remembering where they left off.   Only 40% of their capacity will actually be spent on the 4 tasks, which equates to 10% each!   Definitely not the 25/25/25/25 resource allocation that you sometimes see in plans created in tools like MS Project

Proof?   Just ask yourself about the last time you knew someone who was juggling 4 things at once.   Now, try to compare the number of times they actually made progress on all 4 items to the number of times one (or more) of the four items didn't get any attention.

Below is an excellent blog article on the negative effects of context-switching:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-wise/201209/the-true-cost-mu…