So you think you can multitask?

We all try to juggle a dozen or more things at once, but sometimes I get to the stage where I feel like I’ve taken on too much and I’m just not finishing things off properly.

Same thing applies when I’m trying to focus on something important and I get people walking up to my desk, and my phone is ringing, and my email and IM are flashing… it’s really tough to complete a task in the midst of the distractions.

I was pleased to discover a link today to recent research from Stanford University that supports the idea that humans are just not that good at multitasking.

In fact, we really suck at it, and those amongs us who try to do it perform poorly.

The Stanford researchers call these people “suckers for irrelevancy”.

This supports 2 related ideas I have…

The first is, technical people really need to be given a quiet space to work without interuption if they are to perform at their best.

It can take 30 minutes or more for a developer working on a complex problem to put the necessary mental scaffolding in place and enter a productive ‘zone’, and it takes only a few seconds to interupt them and bring their mental model and focus crashing down.

My personal rule is that if I’m walking towards a developers desk and I see code in their IDE, I turn around and wait until later to speak to them.

Of course, Facebook, Youtube, FML and others all get interupted.

The second related point is the prevalence of openplan office layouts for tech teams.

In my opinion, we’re packing the devs in too tightly, and we would get more productivity out of them by allowing more space, privacy and sound insulation.

What do you think? Can you multi-task effectively or are you more productive with a tighter focus?

Should developers be sitting closely together in an open-plan environment to promote communication and collaboration, or are do they end up drowning out the ‘collaboration’ with headphones so they can get serious work done?