My boss went to a seminar earlier this year which basically changed how our team works. The seminar was on Critical Chain Project Management. The premise is that multi-tasking is bad because it takes you longer to get everything you are doing actually done. In order to prove this--my boss first tried this exercise with my co-worker and I. After she did it with us, she did it with the higher ups to get them in on this idea.
The Activity:
You basically move beads from bowls to plates (sorting them by color), move the beads off the plates, flip the beads over, place them back on the plates, and move all the beads back into a bowl mixing the colors all together again. Each step is done in threes all the way through, and each step is also done by one person (i.e., one person moves the beads, another one or two people flip the beads over).
The first time you try it, you have only one person do one job at a time (so you sort all the beads onto plates first), then the two people in charge of flipping the beads do their job, finally, the first person gets the beads back into the bowls.
The second time you try it, everyone works at the same time, and you focus on one color at a time. So, once the first person sorts the beads, the other two people flip the beads and sort them back on the plates (one color at a time). When one color is sorted, the first person can then transfer those beads back into the original bowl. By having everyone work at the same time, you can see how this second version would take much less time. When we did it, it took half the time.
You can see what she did in more detail by checking out this powerpoint: http://business.baylor.edu/Larry_Chonko//bus1301/projectmgt.pdf
(slides 38 to 51)
By doing this activity, my boss was able to prove to us (and the higher ups) that focusing on one thing at a time would help us get more done in less time than if we try to juggle multiple projects at once.
Within a month after this seminar, my project list went down from 16 projects to two. Now, after six months--my project list is around 3 projects, but as each has it's "down time" (when I'm waiting on other people), I can work another project.
This was an amazing hands-on activity that was fun to do and had really great results.
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After you told me about this, I experimented. I am SO much more productive if I do one thing at a time (I say this while I'm loading my Ipod with fresh podcasts, checking e-mail in three accounts, and washing clothes). The evidence that multi-tasking simply doesn't work has led me to re-think how I structure my classes. I'll go into more detail if anyone is interested.
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