On cooking and multitasking

Multitasking at work is a lot like cooking. If you do some minimum planning you can decide on a recipe, shop for the ingredients and do a simple mental schedule: chop the vegetables while the oven heats, put the rice to boil, call your mother while the chicken roasts, dress the salad in the last minute.

I’m no time management expert, but I’ve learned that multitasking is possible with:
- Some predictability: you can estimate how much exclusive attention a task requires and how much time you need to get it done.
- Planning: to organise multiple tasks together, you need to figure out waiting times and active times (can you eat and whistle at the same time?) – in the end of which you’ll have an idea of how much time you need in total.
- Experience: the more experience you have the less time you need to get things right – experience also improves your ability to improvise.

The problem with this neat recipe is that it assumes you will be left in peace to fulfill your clever plan without unexpected extra tasks and distractions. Is it ever like this in real life? Perhaps you can handle one interruption (the bell rings while you are basting the chicken), but when your dinner guest calls in the last minute to say his date is a vegetarian, you’ll need:
- a good sense of humor
- cold blood
- pure luck: got anything in the fridge to knock up a quick veggie dish?

But if you have some wisdom and experience, you’ll use all you power of improvisation… to order a pizza.  And thinking ahead, you’ll make sure the pizza is served cold so perhaps your friend learns to be a bit more considerate next time