The Daily Stat from Harvard Business Review

 

January 23, 2015 Why Task Juggling Can Be Counterproductive A study of Italian judges shows that those who are "heavy" jugglers of legal cases, jumping from one to another in an attempt to make progress on as many as possible, end up taking longer to complete their portfolios of cases than those who are only "mild" jugglers, Decio Coviello of HEC Montreal, Andrea Ichino of the University of Bologna, and Nicola Persico of Northwestern University's Kellogg School say in an HBR.org article. When you're doing tasks for multiple assigners, you feel pressure from all of them, and sometimes they even lobby you to put their tasks at the top of your queue. But if you juggle these tasks, it takes you longer to complete any of them than if you tackled them sequentially, the researchers say. SOURCE: The Pros and Cons of Doing One Thing at a Time

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