A brief talk by Mike Lyons introducing task switching and its negative effect on productivity. He contrasts being busy with making progress, arguing that switching between tasks fragments attention and reduces flow. He recommends focusing on one task until completion (smaller batches, limiting WIP, Kanban) to maximize flow.
Smaller batches, limiting work in progress, making work visible on a Kanban board. The point of all that is to increase flow through our system. So we're maximizing the amount of work we can do. How many of you have had those days where at the end of the day, you just feel like you didn't get anything done? You know what I mean? Like, we were busy. Yep, super busy. I know I put in, you know, more than eight hours of work today. I was working, I was doing email, I was in meetings, I was responding to meeting requests, I was providing status updates. I was working on this piece of work in development. I was testing another piece of work over here. I was doing some business analysis work on this other thing. And at the end of the day, you feel like I was very, very busy, but I didn't get a lot of work done. Likely, very likely. It's because we switch tasks and we get forced to sort of move from one type of work to a different type of work to a new type of called task switching. The idea of flow is that you're focused in on a single task until it's complete. And here again, just like at work, this is true all around our lives. How many times are you working on one thing at home and then you get distracted and work on something else, leaving that project incomplete, and then you go to the next thing and then go to the third thing because something else comes up. We want to understand that by focusing in on one piece of work until it's complete, we're going to maximize flow.
