Multitasking or switchtasking?

The last days I have read the book The Myth of Multitasking from Dave Crenshaw. The book describes why multitasking waste time and costs money. It describes a story in which a coach Phil advised a company owner Helen. Multitasking means that a person does several things at the same time. But normally he does one thing, stop the thing and does another thing and so on. So, a better word for multitasking is switchtasking. Switching tasks costs time. The book gives a simple tool to understand that: In the first step write the phrase “Multitasking is worse than a lie” letter by letter on a paper. After you wrote a letter of the phrase write a number (1 up to 27) in the next line. Stop the time. Afterwards write the complete phrase letter by letter and than the numbers 1 to 27 in the next line. Stop the time. Normally the second try is faster as the first try. Another tool is to write down all activities you do in a normal week. For example “Work”, “Personal Recreation”, “Family Time”, “Home Improvement” and “Lost Time”, “Sleep”. Add the hours you think you spend for each activity. If you add all the hours maybe you have write down more than 168 hours. A week have only 168 hours. To solve the problem the book gives some recommendations. For example you should create a realistic weekly budget for using time or schedule recurring appointments with key people. If you can, you should delegate activities to other people. Altogether an interesting small book (106 pages plus descriptions of the tools) with some interesting ideas.

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