Single Tasking

In a keynote speech to top CEO's and government officials at the New New Internet Conference in Washington DC, 4-Hour Workweek author Timothy Ferriss makes the claim that people with the most time and the highest incomes are characterized by the ability to single task: focusing on the truly important, without interruption, to completion. Here is a nice, short, edited video from the session:

The entire keynote address can be viewed on the New New Internet Conference site.

Here is a truism: people do not truly multi-task. Multi-tasking, in my opinion, is usually used to describe switching continuously between multiple single tasks over a period of time. So why not just work on one task at a time to completion, one after another? If we really cannot parallel process, the overall duration of completing all of the tasks is the same whether we do one thing at a time or try to "multi-task". If you believe, as many do, that there is a task-switching cost associated with any switch from one task to another, then multi-tasking actually takes more time than performing single tasks at a time to completion.

One could then say that they must start one task before completing another because of a deadline. I would agree that a deadline is a practical implication, but it suggests prioritizing work by deadline, not the need to multi-task! In fact, task switching costs suggests that by prioritizing work and single tasking, we have the best shot at meeting these deadlines.

By the way, we often think that computers multi-task. Strictly speaking, for single processor machines, that is not technically accurate. CPU's work on a single task at a time, and multi-tasking is emulated by having some sort of task switching scheme built into hardware or operating system software. Just like humans, there can be a substantial performance penalty for a computer to task switch.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Articles, Productivity. You can subscribe to any comments to this entry via RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.