The end of multitasking as you know it

“My boss interrupts his interruptions with interruptions.”

It’s a common complaint, repeated recently by “DataBass,” who, in a comment on last week’s column, asked, “Would you please consider speaking for the industries where their IT people are SEVERELY Interrupt Driven?”

Now Advice Line is about next-generation IT — what IT will have to do in the future that it hasn’t done in the past and what we’ll have to stop doing in the future that we’ve been accustomed to doing in the past.

Something that won’t change is principle No. 7 of the KJR Manifesto: Before you can be strategic, you have to be competent. The dreaded triple-I factor — interrupting interruptions with interruptions — is high on the list of what drives organizational incompetence. Next-generation IT can no more afford to be incompetent than this-generation or last-generation IT could, so ending the triple-I effect should be high on every CIO’s to-do list.

The case against interruptions

If you need to demonstrate the damage interruptions do, either to employees who take pride in their multitasking abilities, or to managers who confuse their enthusiasm for the organization’s priorities, here’s an exercise that should do the job, courtesy of my friends at Realization. On a whiteboard, write:

MULTITASK

ABCDEFGHI

123456789

Have each participant copy them down on a piece of paper while you time them. Then have them do the same thing, only this time writing the first character of each line in columns (MA1), followed by the second character (UB2), and so on until they’re done.

You’ll find the second run is about 50 percent longer. Look at the results and you’ll probably also find that they look more ragged — like individually written characters, not words. Ask the participants what else is different between the two runs and you’ll hear that the second one was more stressful, too.

This isn’t one of those showboating B.S. demos, either. The second run is actual multitasking, not just something that vaguely resembles it to make a point. It requires the shifting of mental gears every time a participant changes to a different character string. That’s multitasking in action.

Thus, multitasking — interrupting interruptions with interruptions — costs more, delivers worse results, and creates stress. Let’s do it again! If evidence and logic ever persuaded anyone, that would be the end of it. Case made, case closed.

Given a choice between what evidence and logic dictate and what someone wants to believe, evidence and logic don’t stand a chance. This won’t help those whose interruptions are interrupted by interruptions in the slightest. Those who interrupt them will criticize them for their inability to multitask and go their merry way, looking for someone else to interrupt with their next bout of enthusiasm.

Protecting yourself from interruptions

Here’s a simple technique, borrowed from the Kanban variant of agile development. It won’t stop the interruptions themselves, but it might mitigate the damage.

What you’ll do is buy a pack of large index cards and a box of pushpins. Every time you get an assignment, write its name on a card (it’s a “user story” if you like the term), along with the name of the person who told you to work on it, who it’s for, and how long you expect it to take, sans interruptions. Tack it to your cubicle wall in a column on the far left.

When you start work on an assignment, move it to a second column, to the right of the first one. Add the expected completion date, then (very important) notify both the assigner and beneficiary that you’ve started to work on it and when you expect to be done.

In comes an interrupter with a new top priority. You ostentatiously pull out an index card, fill it out, and add it to the top of the left-most column, gesturing at the tasks that precede it to show the requester when you expect to start working on it. This works best face-to-face. Otherwise you have to describe it — suboptimal, but still workable.

If the interrupter isn’t satisfied and tells you it’s a higher priority than other items — especially if he tells you to stop what you’re doing to work on the new assignment instead — don’t argue. Agree — so long as the interrupter calls the assigner and beneficiary of the task you’re working on to let them know delivery will be delayed, as well as calls your manager to get approval for the rearrangement of your priority queue.

What if there’s just one chronic interrupter and it’s your boss or your boss’s boss? This same technique works even better: You’ve shown your boss (or boss’s boss) the impact of their mandated change in your priorities and asked them to take official responsibility for it. Beyond that, you have no cause for concern.

Do you feel just like a bureaucrat? If so, it’s probably because somewhere along the way we decided as a culture that planning is bureaucratic — improvisation is how all real red-blooded Americans get things done. You need to recognize this is an unfortunate aspect of our culture, not an unfortunate aspect of planning.

How it should work

It doesn’t have to be this contentious. Often the triple-I effect is the result of managers failing to respect the chain of command. Depending on the circumstances, either your manager, a steering committee, or an algorithm should determine the relative priority of the tasks sitting in your queue.

For that matter, it probably shouldn’t be your queue at all. It should be the team’s queue, which can be managed very much as outlined above.

The original question

The last piece of the puzzle is an important dimension of the original question: how to handle circumstances in which minor but real emergencies intervene frequently enough that they — not people with an overabundance of enthusiasm — are the primary source of interruptions.

I know of two solutions. The first works well in larger IT shops and is to always have a designated on-call emergency responder. This responsibility can either rotate, be a permanent part of the junior-most team member’s job, or serve as the official penalty for being the last one to show up for a staff meeting.

The second alternative is even simpler, and it works for small shops: Statistically speaking, you know you’ll be interrupted an average of x number of times per week, with the interruptions averaging y minutes apiece.

Build that knowledge into your schedule. Call it the Interruption Fudge Factor (IFF for the TLA-philic among us). Add it to your estimates for every assignment and worry no more. You have the triple-I factor covered.

This story, “The end of multitasking as you know it,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’ Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.