We recommend: Henrik Kniberg — 'Focus (or Stop Starting, Start Finishing)'

Parallelizing productivity: The unbearable cost of constant context switching

We recently watched an inspiring video by Henrik Kniberg on how the desire to parallelize is actually hurting us. Check it out below!

Our Thoughts

We all experience interruptions throughout the day—like receiving a Slack message that simply says "hello"¹ or dealing with a colleague who disrupts you with a question they could have easily googled.

You might also be familiar with the situation where a dependency on another team blocks your progress, forcing you to switch tasks to keep the sprint moving.

In this video, Henrik effectively illustrates the cost of context switching, regardless of what the reason for doing so might be. He also challenges the assumption that engineers can be treated like factory workers, where focusing on a single type of work is supposed to increase efficiency.

Takeaway

Focus on having only a single task in progress at a time. It might feel challenging at first, but by planning your day, week, or sprint carefully and breaking down your work into smaller tasks, you can effectively reduce the amount of work in progress.

Call to Action

When you’re back at it, have a look at how many tasks you have running in parallel. Try to re-prioritize your work to help stop the things that can wait, and start finishing the important work.

1. https://nohello.net/en/