Reduce / eliminate multitasking

As we’ve described here multitasking is disastrous for productivity.  If you have a job where somebody is multitasking on it, ask if there’s any way they can work full time on it to get it done as quickly as possible.  Thus suppose there’s a 3 person-day (PD) job on your project and somebody’s assigned 1 day per week to do it, then it’s going to take 3 weeks.  Ask if there’s any way they could give you all three days together.  This would reduce the duration from 3 weeks (15 days) to 3 days!  It won’t always be possible but every time it is, you’ll see dramatic improvements.  As we never get tired of saying, multitasking has a COLOSSAL effect on how quickly projects can be done.