Human Task Switches Considered Harmful
Posted in Professional Development, Project Management, Software Development by Thomas Cantrell
on May 25, 2009 No Comments yet
An Oldy But A Goody from Joel on Software:
[P]rogramming tasks take so long to task switch. I feel like when I have two programming projects on my plate at once, the task switch time is something like 6 hours. In an 8-hour day, that means multitasking reduces my productivity to 2 hours per day. Pretty dismal.
While this is eight years old, it is still extremely true. It’s good to remember really how inefficient it is to try to do multiple things while programming.
In my world, my responsibilities are spread over enough topics that I can easily switch between things and take over a day to “task switch.” That’s why it’s really good to try to focus on one main thing. Now if I could only control outside interruptions…