Speeding Up Without Multitasking

I'm not a fan of multitasking. There are plenty of studies that show that multitasking slows you down (links at the end). But you may not know what to do instead of multitasking. Here are some ideas:

1. Take a few minutes and write down everything you need to do. Part of speeding up is to make conscious decisions about what work to do when. If you are ever surprised by a particular piece of work, make sure you collect all the work somewhere, written down. I like to write everything down on a list on a legal tablet, just to make sure I have it all. I don't recommend stickies, unless you post them all on a wall and then transcribe them to a piece of paper. You want to make sure your list doesn't vanish onto the floor. Index cards are good because you can shuffle them, if you need to.
   
2. Now, what's your first thing to do? If you have six #1 priorities, either have a discussion with your manager in a one-on-one, or decide. I usually decide, because it's easier to ask forgiveness later than permission before.
3. Now you can do some work. For each piece of work, is it a task? If so, fine. Make sure you break your tasks down into very small chunks. You want to get to the point where, if you have five minutes, you can accomplish something, even if it's not very much. You want to finish something so you don't have to remember where you were on that task.
4. If the work is not a task but a small project, what's the first thing you need to do? How long will that take?
   

My rule of thumb is to use inch-pebbles or tasks that are even smaller, to make headway. You want to get to the point where you are in a wait state on a project so that you can move to another project, do some work on that, get to a completion/wait state there. The more wait states you get to, the more options you have as to what to do next. That's what allows you to speed up and not multitask.

Whatever you do, don't multitask. If you don't believe me, here are some links about the uselessness of multitasking: http://www.umich.edu/~bcalab/multitasking.html

In addition, here's a recent article discussing how people who think they are good at multitasking actually are not:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8219212.stm

More about multitasking: http://idiacomputing.com/moin/ContextSwitching