#2782

 

So someone on my team sent the following link around last week – "The Multi-Tasking Myth". Tom DeMarco says pretty much the same thing in his book "Slack" – which I’ve been reading the past couple of weeks, but haven’t quite finished. The number he uses is 15 minutes but it’s close.

 

The thought that really struck me was that as a manager I occasionally have to go talk to one of my reports. Yeah, really – I’m expected to interact with them. I often open the conversation with "Have you got a minute?". Of course what I actually should be saying is "Do you mind be blowing away the next twenty minutes of your day?". Even if I’m done in two or three it’ll take a developer the remainder of that time to reassemble whatever they were working on in their head.