From the course: Agile Foundations

The cost of multitasking

From the course: Agile Foundations

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The cost of multitasking

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- Multitasking is the opposite of focus. You're working on everything at once, hoping to be more efficient. This trend is common in the workplace. Many job descriptions require the skill of multitasking in a fast-paced environment. If you have a set amount of time and a set amount of tasks, then it just seems to make sense that you'd want to work on them all at the same time. However, multitasking has a hidden cost. Think of your own experience. Maybe you were writing an office memo and then suddenly got an email from your supervisor, so you stop writing the memo and you start reading the email. Then decide to jot out a quick reply. When you went back to the memo, you probably had to take a few moments to review where you left off. Then once you got writing again, there might be another email. Each time you switch between tasks, you have to do a little bit of thinking to get back on track. Humans have a difficult time switching between work items. The transition period for your brain to go from one task to the next is called context switching. Research who studied this found that if you try to multitask with three or more tasks at the same time, you're spending much more time context switching than finishing the work. That's why one of the very first things you want to think about when you embrace a more agile mindset is to try and limit your team's multitasking. Instead of working on several different things at once, the entire team will focus on a limited set of high value tasks. This team can then complete the high value work. This helps with one of Agile's guiding principles, continuous delivery in short iterations. These short iterations are commonly called sprints. To deliver the highest value items, each sprint requires focus. You have to be very careful where the team spends their time. Reducing multitasking is one of the original ideas behind an agile framework called Scrum. If you're a rugby fan, you're probably familiar with this term. In Scrum, all the players work together simultaneously to push the same ball closer to the goal. There's no multitasking, and instead, everyone on the team is focused on the one ball. That's the same way all the members of a Scrum development teamwork simultaneously to complete a small set of tasks. They work together in a short amount of time to move the product closer to the goal. We'll go into Scrum more deeply in another video, but the key thing to remember is that Agile teams try to do their best to avoid multitasking.

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