Why you should not multi task !!

In my long career, it was not uncommon to see a bunch of engineers attending the Release meeting of Platform meeting or Product meeting with their laptops, fully immersed in their little worlds -- doing a 'body present - mind absent' routine. Well, in defense of some multitasking aficionados , they truly try to optimize on their time by attending a meeting as well as doing some thing else useful like .. say coding or chatting etc!!

In agile organizations, it is given that you always keep your eye on the IRC chat window, keep track of in-coming bugs, comment on relevant bugs, test/develop/plan etc.,etc.,

In my earlier assignment, one thing I did bad was, not being available in the IRC channel always. Even when I was on the channels, I did not pay much attention to the chat when I was busy doing my scripting/tooling etc.,

One thing I always tried to do was -- not to take my laptop into a meeting unless I needed it to present some thing or follow an issue on screen.

I suspect that some of my esteemed colleagues might have found my dislike for continuous multitasking as a short coming but ... that seems not such a bad tactic after all.

You don't believe me !!

Then please read this http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2010/05/how-and-why-to-stop-multitaski.html