Many of us make a living by working on tasks while monitoring email, taking a few calls, and in non uncommon cases also keeping up with Facebook, Twitter, and more. Often it's multiple tasks, and we get better at plate spinning. To a degree that's good, because if you want to move into management, consulting, or run your own business you won't have the luxury of just doing one thing. In fact, it's that move away from doing one thing (and being good at one thing) that is the deciding for many of us to prefer being 'just' an employee. Nothing wrong with that.

But, getting better at plate spinning doesn't decrease the cost of doing it, or at least the decrease in productivity for any one task. I'd like to think I'm reasonably good at juggling multiple tasks, but it is tiring. Ever watch them spin plates? It's fun to start with, you think you can add one or two more, then you hit the point where it's an all out sprint to keep them going. When you're well rested and energized, you can do it for quite a while. But then you get sick, tired, or maybe someone (often you) decides you can always do one more plate - and then you start dropping things. Hopefully you drop the things that matter the least, but regardless it usually means you've failed to do something you committed to - how much that matters depends on your ethics and pride.

The challenge here is that when you're spinning two plates and you're doing it easily, when that third task comes along there doesn't appear to be any reason not to do it - you don't want to look lazy, you want the money, or just like the challenge. You go from 50% capacity to 75% - and that still leaves room for one more right? We need to stay at a pretty high utilization rate to earn the money, satisfy customers/employers, but at least for me, stay short of the point where any minor snag means I deliver something late.

So the title is about measuring, and maybe that's not the best title, but I do have a way for you to assess the cost of the task switching. Stop doing everything and do just one thing. Turn off the phone, email, instant message, blog reader, etc, and just work for 4 hours. Then turn it all back on again and think about the difference. I've made it a habit for the last several years to spend 3-4 hours on Sunday morning working on tasks that are either nice to have, or require serious concentration. It's relaxing to be able to focus and stay focused.

We can't go back to doing one thing at a time, if there ever was a time when it was that way to start with. But we can work on more accurately understanding our utilization rate and the strain it's placing on us, and then use that to make decisions about things that come along that we didn't expect.