Multitask or Unitask?

[glatt]

Originally Posted by BigV

Bah.

There is no "multitask". Only round-robin, short cycle, "unitasks"...

This is true, but there's also an efficiency to strive for.

We are less and less a manual labor workforce, but manual laborers offer the best examples of this. If you are a carpenter, building a house, you want to put your stack of lumber right where you need it, with all the pieces in the order you will need them. If you end up having to re-stack your pile of lumber 3 or 4 times as you are digging through it looking for just the right board, you are wasting too much time. You should have no wasted movements. Every motion you make should be productive. If you are like that, you won't actually be working very hard, but you will build your house in half the time your competition does. It's all about being efficient.

With today's office jobs, it can be more difficult to see where there are obvious inefficiencies. We come up with catch phrases like "multitasking" but I think we are just doing what the old-timers did. Trying to be efficient.