I have to say upfront: depending on context, multitasking can be either a great performance booster or shortcut to complete failure.

A few days back Yahoo published an article (originally from Baltimore Sun, Multitasking often recipe for disaster), which happen to highlight a few aspects of this.

I’ll try to be brief.

1. When multitasking is good

Big corporation, team communications, complex relations and politics… This kind of environment demands multitasking. Why?

Because when you develop something, which depends on somebody else, you will face some idle time when you actually wait for certain things to be delivered (test results, meeting minutes, a class architecture, documents, finalized API definition, etc). So, you wait. It’s not like you sit in your cubicle and wait. Some people, actually do that, spacing time, surfing internet, doing practically nothing.

Others - do some project with lower priority, waiting for road block to be cleared. This type of interruption is natural for multitasking and generally does not create side effects. This is good for developer: being more productive and increasing level of experience, the developer is actually grows a lot as a professional this way and learns how to communicate with others.

2. When multitasking is good for a company, but bad for an employee

When switching between projects caused by politics, manager’s “executive decision” or other reason than natural flow, there are side effects. It’s still good overall (especially for company), but now comes with a price.

Side effects: stress, carpal tunnel syndrome, employee frustration, much lower quality of results, apathy, decreased interest to project, lack of creativity.

I’ve seen very strong developers, who can do amazing things, stepping out for only one reason: politics driven multitasking.

3. When multitasking  is bad for a company and good for an employee

We all know who “bureaucrats” are. Enough said.

4. When multitasking is bad for everybody

When it’s taken over the limit by politics, by poor management and by under-resourced environment. It basically means, when company (or group) is in bad condition, there is no way to save it by doing more projects at the same time.

In this case a company would get multiple projects done (presumably done) with very-very-very low quality almost in every aspect of it: from scalability to features, from sustaining to upgrade. Employees will get significant level of stress and pretty good incentive to start looking for some other job.

Conclusion: as any other tool, multitasking can be used right or wrong way. It’s not a self-directing device. How it works strongly depends on the context of implementation.

del.icio.us live digg netscape