Good multitasking skills means good single tasking

Once in a while someone states that it's essential nowadays have good multitasking skills. Then at the same time someone else states, that you need to learn to focus on one thing to really get things done. This seems like conflict, but I think neither is really wrong or right.

Fact is that in work and personal life is more and more full of interruptions and new tasks to be done. People try to achieve more and more without making anything properly. The key for good task handling is a skill to be able to jump in to things fast and then focus on those.

Method to handle many things at the same time is to give full focus to one thing at the time, and not letting the others to disrupt your focus. Most important thing is the capability to switch tasks. It requires skill to let one thing go and jump into another. For many this is the hard part, they can't really let the other thing ago and for that reason are not able to concentrate on the new thing either.

There is couple of tricks I use for task switching. The number one thing is, there's always time for documenting the status. It doesn't take long to write down the thoughts, ideas and place you where, when you jump in to another task. When you learn it, it takes only 5-15 seconds. With doing this, your awareness can be totally focused on the new thing. Without short documentation, you need to try to keep your previous status on mind, and you can't focus on the new thing.

Second thing is closely related to the previous. In order to be able to document your situation fast, there needs to be ways to document it available. Either it's the textpad in computer, note taker in mobile or post-it with pen, these needs to be available and you need to have a practice of documenting the status with that tool. It's easy to learn, but you can't afford 30 seconds of waiting, where to document.

There are many good methodologies on concentrating on essential. I really recommend trying out habit 3 from 7 habits of highly effective people, personal backlog, personal kanban board, pomodoro or any other time and task management system. Even though these are excellent ways to learn to use your time more efficiently, these still don't change the fact that sometimes you need to change tasks rapidly. Either it is the phone, email, text or something that comes to your mind suddenly, you still need to be ready to act on it. For that, it's best to learn to change tasks fast on the fly.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book I read - The Toyota Way

Mainly because of interest to Agile SW development and Lean thinking, I read The Toyota Way -14 management principles from the world's greatest manufacturer from Jeffrey K. Liker. Like it says, it's a book about Toyota much praised manufacturing system.

Whole idea behind the book is to give an better view what makes Toyota manufacturing system such a good one. It introduces TPS (Toyota Production System), Kanban and lots of other systems they use.Still most importantly it tells about the importance of company culture, continuous learning and true understanding about the thinking behind TPS.

I've always been a big fan of thinking, "understand before you act" and that seems to be one of the key principles in Toyota also. Almost everywhere in this book it comes obvious that thorough understanding is the key to success. Hiding true problems behind quick win fixes is not profitable in the long run.

I really liked the book. It opens quite well the thinking behind TPS and the culture what they have there in Toyota. Of course it's just a tip of iceberg you understand based on one book, but at least I think it's the right ice berg to understand. Just trying to learn Kanban and Lean by how others are doing it, easily misses lot of very important aspects of the whole methodology.

I would recommend this book to all of you interested about Lean or TPS. Also those of you who see it beneficial to understand different kind companies, business models, manufacturing and company culture's.

The only small recommendation I would like to give to Dr Liker is, that maybe in the next edition there could be glossary, since there's so many terms flying around all the time, it's sometimes bit tricky to keep on track of all those.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen