In your every day work, you are probably working on more than one project at the same time. Sometimes, you have so many tasks to do that you don’t know with which one you have to start. You observe your progress but you don’t seem to be getting anywhere. Maybe you have a problem, or you’re just human…

Study

In 90s, two professors of Harvard, Steven C.Wheelwright and Kim B.Clark have studied human productivity when we are working on many concurrent tasks (you can find this result in their book Revolutionizing Product Development: Quantum Leaps in Speed, Efficiency and Quality). This chart gives the percent of time working on tasks relative to the number of concurrent tasks to do:

Multitasking & productivity

So, what do we see here? The highest productivity is reached when we have only two concurrent tasks. With more than two, we waste too much time on switching. With only one, when we’re blocked, we waste time. With two, you can work on a task and when you’re blocked, you switch to the other one. This result is easy to understand but it is too often forgotten by managers who wants to drive sometimes too many projects at the same time (and so, they give too much concurrent tasks to his/her team members -> but remember, they’re just human too…).

How to improve my productivity?

Okay, our management team can sometimes decrease our productivity when they give us too many tasks (maybe, it may be a good idea to show him/her this study). But, what about ourselves?

Today, if you have Internet at work, you probably add to yourself many tasks: read the last RSS feeds, see what is going on on Tweeter, look at your social networks, access to your personal emails… And now, you know that it decreases your productivity in a way you don’t want. So, try to keep you some time-breaks to manage your “personal concurrent tasks” but don’t work at the same time : just close them when you are working (yes, close the gmail tab .

Credits: dilbert.com

LeechBlock can help

If you’re a user of Firefox, I recommend you to install the LeechBlock extension:

LeechBlock is a simple productivity tool designed to block those time-wasting sites that can suck the life out of your working day. (You know: the ones that rhyme with ‘Blue Cube’, ‘Pie Face’, ‘Space Hook’, ‘Hash Pot’, ‘Sticky Media’, and the like.) All you need to do is specify which sites to block and when to block them.

You can specify up to six sets of sites to block, with different times and days for each set. You can block sites within fixed time periods (e.g., between 9am and 5pm), after a time limit (e.g., 10 minutes in every hour), or with a combination of time periods and time limit (e.g., 10 minutes in every hour between 9am and 5pm). You can also set a password for access to the extension options, just to slow you down in moments of weakness!

With this tool, the temptation is lower and you can configure it as you want.

Have you already try this kind of tools? Does it prevent you from being disturbed?