John Cox

Working in Serial

For an introduction to this article, please read the basis of my 7 Habits for Highly Productive people. I will probably have to change the title of this once I hear from Covey's lawyers, but in the meantime it works for me.

Multi-tasking is a term that the professional getting things done writers beat up, and yet we still do because we have taught to do it. It is, in my opinion, a learned behavior more from peer pressure than anything else. 'What? You can't walk and chew gum at the same time'? 'You are going to have to learn to do more that one thing at once'. Are common pressures that our bosses and co-workers place on us, and so we become multi-taskers.

The quasi-intellectual argument:

I look at multi-tasking a bit different. I fall back to my electronics experience and some of my earliest teachings. A serial circuit allows current to be a constant. The upside of this is the current remains constant while the voltage drops vary. The downside of this is once a component in the circuit goes bad, then the entire circuit quits working. A parallel keeps the voltage constant, but allows the current to vary based on the branch. The upside is if one component goes bad, the rest of the circuit remains working. The down side is the current will fluctuate based on the number of components on a branch. While in parallel, data transfer works in tandem, serial makes data stand in line.

To take this just a bit further. Voltage is the difference of potential of energy. Current is the flow of said energy. Resistance (and we will keep it at that, no reason to get into inductance and capacitance) is force that changes the flow of current. So if we place this in mathematical terms, I = E/R, otherwise current is inversely proportional to resistance, and directly proportional to voltage (or energy). If you think about this in its simplest terms, we can draw correlations to how our brain works.

Let's consider it this way. Voltage is the amount of energy that we actually have to work. Current is the time that we have. Resistance is the work that we have to get accomplished. Since we have a finite of each, we can think about our problem mathematically again: T(ime) = E(nergy) / W(ork). Seems simple enough when we look at it in such a simple equation. I wouldn't say that the equation is earth shattering, nor probably accurate, but it is a simple way to look at our time, energy, and work to see how well best to accomplish what we want.

I don't know about you, but my goal is to keep my T(ime) or current a constant. I don't necessarily worry about working over a 40 hour work week, but to restate my goal, "I don't want to take my work home with me". I want to spend my time doing my things, and the time that I am paid for doing work for my organization. I can't really control the amount of work that I have at any give time, but I can control the amount of energy that I use to get 'er done, and thus my thesis on working in serial is the better way to approach your never ending pile of work to accomplish.

Painting the Rembrandt

Now that we are out of the theoretical portion, let's paint our picture a little differently. I have certain priorities that I need to accomplish on a daily basis. That might be returning phone calls, filling out paperwork, answering my actionable items on e-mail, going to meetings, participating in conference calls, being on site with a customer. Each of these items is a task that I must accomplish today to be successful. I know that I have 24 hours in a day to accomplish them. How can I best use the energy that I have from three Snickers bars and a pot of coffee to get them done?

Do I approach the day working on all my items at once? Do I devote the same amount of energy to each, but let the time fluctuate to finish all the items, or do I devote a specific amount of time to each with fluctuations in the energy that I push forward. In my little perfect world, I know that it takes much less energy for myself to answer a phone call than it does to fill out a simple TPS memo. Not only that, but I would like at the end of the day to go home and not open up my laptop.

Breaking the habit

Since working in parallel is learned behavior brought on by peer pressure, how do we break that habit? Becoming productive is the best way to do it. What will be the hardest habit to break is working in parallel sometimes and working in series in others. In electronics, surprisingly enough, this is called a series / parallel circuit. It has definite current drops over portions of the circuit while constant current across others. More than likely, in some way, this is how we all behave. We try to check our email while in meetings. We try to type while on the phone with another. However, when faced with a large task, we devote all of our time to finishing it, so that we can go back to checking our email and catching that 2 o'clock by the skin of our teeth.

I am going to tell you to stop doing that. Treat everything as you do that big project. Devote time to checking your email and answering it, then stop checking until the next devoted time. If you have a 2 o'clock meeting, devote your energy to making that a successful meeting. Do your job to the best of your abilities for each task that you have. What you will find you are working less, as you are not having to go back and redo the things that you did last week. You will also find that you are setting more accurate priorities based on your capacity, rather than based on your workload. If you can't finish an item today, then don't start it. Do it right the first time by making the time the constant in the equation, rather than your energy.

Sum it up

Working in serial is better due to being able to set the time as a constant rather than setting the energy as a constant. We are all probably working in a series-parallel mind frame right now, but are we accomplishing what we can to the best of our abilities?

If you can't finish a task, then shut that task down rather than trying to do two things at once. It does you absolutely no good to finish two items at once if the quality of both items are crapola. "If you can't do it right, then don't do it at all".