Where Does Your Time Go?

Computerworld - Last week, I visited a development team working on the company's next big product. As I talked to one of the team members, I could hear phones ringing and pagers beeping and see people popping up to talk over the cube walls. There was a general buzz in the room.

During the course of our conversation, the person I was talking to answered three questions from co-workers, looked at his pager five times and answered a call on his cell phone.

"You've got a lot going on," I said.

"Busy people get the most done," the developer said with conviction.

	Esther Derby provides high-leverage facilitation to start projects on a solid footing, assess the current state of projects and capture lessons learned. You can reach her at derby@estherderby.com or by visiting her Web site. Esther also writes a weblog on managing software development.

But do they? It depends on the kind of "busy."

Knowledge work (developing software, for example) requires immersion -- deep concentration in solving a problem. And immersion requires periods of uninterrupted time.

What happens when we don't have time for immersion? It takes longer to solve problems and accomplish work. Much longer. Unfortunately, sometimes when we feel busy all the time, we don't notice that we're not really getting much done.

If you find yourself feeling constantly busy or you leave the office wondering what you actually finished, your busyness may be blocking you from accomplishing your work.

The Multitasking Myth

Remember the old joke about walking and chewing gum at the same time? Turns out that there's some truth to that old saw ... not that some people are too dumb to do two things at once, but that trying to do two (or more) things at once actually reduces cognitive functioning.

Multitasking isn't always a bad thing, but the more complex the tasks or the more different (such as switching between coding and high-level design or to management activities), the greater the toll on time and quality. Tasks that require concentration -- safety-critical activities or activities that require attention to detail -- are poor candidates for multitasking.

The more often you switch between tasks, the longer it will take to complete any one of the tasks. Each switch can eat up between five and 30 minutes of your time.

That lost time goes to mentally closing out one task, picking up the other task, re-creating a train of thought and remembering exactly where you were. If the time between putting down a task is more