By Thursday afternoon there are ten things open: a draft, two replies, a budget, a presentation half-built. None of them is finished. Each one, every time you look at it, asks to be picked up again from the beginning.
What the research shows
Switching has a price
In four experiments, Joshua Rubinstein, David Meyer and Jeffrey Evans had people switch between tasks such as solving maths problems and sorting shapes. Every switch cost time, and the cost grew when the tasks were more complex or less familiar. A day made of many half-done things is a day of constant switching.
What we leave behind keeps part of our attention
Sophie Leroy found that when we move from an unfinished task to a new one, part of our attention stays with the first, and we do the second one less well. Finishing alone was not always enough: people let go of the first task most easily when they had finished it under a little time pressure.
We underestimate how long things take
Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin and Michael Ross asked students when they expected to finish their thesis. Their best estimate was about 34 days; the average actual time was about 55, and fewer than a third finished by the date they had predicted. Even their worst-case estimate was too short. Starting many things at once rests on a calculation that is already too optimistic.
Progress matters more than we think
Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer collected almost 12,000 daily diary entries from 238 people in 26 project teams. The event that most often marked people’s best working days, in 76 per cent of them, was making progress on meaningful work. A finished step is not only a result; it is what makes the next day feel possible.
What finishing really means
Finishing does not mean doing everything. It means having fewer things open at the same time, and closing each one properly: done, handed over, planned for later, or dropped on purpose. What weighs is not the amount of work but the amount of work that is neither done nor decided.
Worth trying
- Count what is open. Write down everything you have started and not finished. The number alone is often a surprise.
- Put a limit on it. Decide how many things can be open at once, for example three, and do not start a fourth before one is closed.
- Close in four ways, not one. Finish it, hand it over, give it a date and a next step, or drop it and say so. All four free your attention.
- Cut it smaller. If something never gets finished, the next step is probably too big. A step you can complete in one sitting is a step that ends.
- Double your estimate. The research on planning suggests that your first estimate is usually short. Plan with the longer one.
For those who lead a team
Teams start more than they finish when everything is urgent and nothing is stopped. A short list of what the team is working on now, visible to everyone, makes it easier to say “not yet” to the next request. Asking in a meeting “what can we close this week?” changes the conversation as much as asking “what is new?”. And recognising finished steps, not only big results, is how progress becomes visible.
What does being reachable cost you? A short test. →
Sources
- Rubinstein, J. S., Meyer, D. E., Evans, J. E. (2001). Executive control of cognitive processes in task switching. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27(4), 763–797. www.apa.org
- Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168–181. econpapers.repec.org
- Buehler, R., Griffin, D., Ross, M. (1994). Exploring the “planning fallacy”: Why people underestimate their task completion times. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 366–381. bear.warrington.ufl.edu
- Amabile, T. M., Kramer, S. J. (2011). The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. Harvard Business Review Press. www.amanet.org