One of the bigger problems facing the modern workplace is a spate of competing priorities. Public and private employers alike have dreamed up so many ideas, plans, and initiatives that workers simply cannot juggle assignments as they come in from the boss. This is having disastrous consequences with respect to productivity.
For instance, internal studies of one particular Fortune 500 retailer unveiled that store managers had been assigned more tasks than they could handle in a normal workweek. In just six months, the company had rolled out over ninety different initiatives, burdening staff members with bloated to-do lists. Not surprisingly, business waned, and customer service scores took a hit.1 The reasons why are obvious: as store managers became stretched too thin, they were not able to pour enough time, energy, and resources into each assignment, leaving a trail of partially-finished work behind them. With such an emphasis placed on quantity, the quality of the work being done at this particular store fell precipitously.
Other studies tell a similar tale: in a survey of 1,400 people, twenty percent of respondents claimed they had reached their limit and could not take on any more assignments at work. Meanwhile, one in three of those surveyed asserted they always have more items on their to-do list than they are capable of completing. Nearly forty percent of folks blamed their crammed agendas on a lack of “clear limits or rules about which tasks they should accept or reject.”2
In other words, a lack of prioritization. In a world where everything is a five-alarm fire, tasks are stripped of their relative importance, leaving employees unable to discern which projects matter most at any given time. Hence, they try to do everything at once.
Again, an office full of employees neck-deep in tasks does not bode well for productivity in the long run. While the culture in most professional circles continues to celebrate the art of multitasking, the numbers actually tell us we should be doing less. When the brain tries to juggle several assignments at once, it is forced to switch back and forth between tasks, which comes at a cost. Experiments conducted by Joshua Rubinstein, PhD, Jeffrey Evans, PhD, and David Meyer, PhD, asked subjects to bounce back and forth from one activity to another (such as switching between solving math problems and classifying objects). Subjects were unable to smoothly transition from one task to the next; instead, valuable time slipped away as they tried to orient themselves to the new task at hand. As tasks grew more complex, subjects took significantly longer to make the switch. Costs in terms of time lost also increased when subjects were forced to flip-flop between less familiar tasks. According to Meyer, the brief mental blocks created through task-switching can come at the expense of as much as forty percent of a person’s productive time.3
When employees are bombarded with a deluge of assignments, their brains are forced to switch tasks constantly, often between more than just two. The aforementioned study of 1,400 people found that sixty percent of respondents had more than sixty personal or work-related tasks to accomplish each week. Fifteen percent of people who answered were trying to balance more than 100 tasks.4
It is easy to see how task-switching of this sort can generate enough mental blocks to severely detract from the time workers spend actually getting things done. According to the Anatomy of Work Index, which asked over 10,000 employees around the globe about life in the office, eighty-eight percent of knowledge workers admitted that projects have been delayed and deadlines missed because of the sheer number of tasks assigned to them. Furthermore, only twenty-seven percent of the average employee’s time is spent on the job they were hired to do in the first place.5
We haven’t even discussed the health concerns caused by an abundance of priorities. When bosses, managers, and supervisors deem every task an emergency, their subordinates become overwhelmed by the pressure to get things done, and as a result, their stress levels rise. Research on workers in both the United States and the United Kingdom determined that ninety-four percent of them suffered from high levels of work-related stress — just over half were losing sleep because of it.6 Because high stress levels are known for having an adverse effect on health, this has obvious implications for productivity. An ailing workforce is unlikely to be a very productive one.
Today’s work environment brings several demands to bear. Ambitious professionals eager to boost the bottom line and please their superiors are incessantly coming up with novel ideas and planning for the next Big Thing. Ironically, in their efforts to achieve exceptional productivity, they are having the opposite effect. As more and more projects are perceived to be of the utmost importance, the hierarchy of priorities evaporates, creating a multi-assignment tie at the top of the to-do list. This leads to lost time, unfinished work, and more unhealthy workers.
Citations:
1. Hollister, R., & Watkins, M. D. (2020, February 7). Why Companies Won’t Let Bad Projects Die. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved January 27, 2023, from https://hbr.org/2018/09/too-many-projects
2. Bolden-Barrett, V. (2019, January 24). Workers with overstuffed to-do lists feel overwhelmed, not organized, study shows. HR Dive. Retrieved January 27, 2023, from https://www.hrdive.com/news/workers-with-overstuffed-to-do-lists-feel-overwhelmed-not-organized-study/546622/
3. American Psychological Association. (2006, March 20). Multitasking: Switching costs. American Psychological Association. Retrieved January 27, 2023, from https://www.apa.org/topics/research/multitasking
4. Bolden-Barrett, V. (2019, January 24).
5. Everett, C. (2022, November 11). Pointless work is killing productivity, and employee wellbeing. Raconteur. Retrieved January 30, 2023, from https://www.raconteur.net/business-strategy/productivity/employee-wellbeing-overtime/
6. Bolden-Barrett, V. (2019, January 24).