October 2009
Intermediate to advanced
504 pages
15h 39m
English
Individuals feel compelled to multitask because the organizations in which we work attempt to multitask as well. The corporate form of multitasking is pursuing too many concurrent projects. When an organization takes on too many projects, people become shared across multiple projects, which leads to individual multitasking. The detrimental effect of multitasking then causes those projects to take longer, which leads to more multitasking near the end of the project when “we need to get started” on the next project.
An eight-year study of projects at a dozen companies and published in Harvard Business Review concluded that “projects get done faster if the organization takes on fewer at a time” (Adler et al. 1996 ...
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