Productivity: The Pros and Cons of Doing One Thing at a Time

The pros and cons of multitasking is so often discussed that we have a word for it – multitasking. How about doing one thing at a time?

Andrew O’Connell of the Harvard Business Review explore what’s good and bad about not juggling tasks. He cites a study done on 21 Italian judges, where 10 who did the most juggling of active cases had a lower average likelihood of closing a case in a given week.

But then a study in Singapore found that a three-minute time-out for a highly distracting word task helped people come up with more-novel ideas for designing a children’s toy.

Read the full story on the Harvard Business Review.