I’m a somewhat unrepentant multi-tasker. It just comes naturally to me. I have no flow issues with jumping from one item, conversation, project to another, then another, then another and then maybe jumping back. I find that this really disturbs the people around me that are really focused on single tasks. There is also some evidence that multi-tasking can diffuse effectiveness.
Drucker really pushes this in the Effective Executive. While that book was ahead of its time, it’s really tough in today’s environment for busy Extension Professionals to have the luxury of “checking out” and devoting long blocks of time to specific projects.
So what is the answer? To middle ground options that I’ve been playing around with are “chunking” and “time boxing”. I think that both can be good tools for Extension Professionals to test. Here is a quick summary of each.
Time Boxing
I found time boxing through
Dwayne Melacon’s link to this post on Dave Cheong’s blog. Time boxing refers to setting a pre-determined time frame for each project or task. Dave’s post has a good overview of the process. I like the idea because I think we in Extension tend to suffer from Parkinson’s Law , which generally states that “work expands to fit the amount of time allotted to its completion” (see interpretations applied to other uses here). I really liked Dave’s connections to doing the most important things first and his discussion of “null time”.
Chunking
Related to time boxing is chunking. I found this via
Lisa Haneberg’s blog. Lisa talks about chunking your day into blocks of time as an alternative to multi-tasking. See her post here for her idea of chunking and a tool she uses.
Both of these tools are closely related and can benefit Extension Professionals by allowing more time for them to focus. If you’re an Outlook user, you might want to look at this post for a brief description on how to create 30 minute chunks of time in Outlook.