Multi-Tasking Turtles Beat Focused Hares

Fast access to new information and multi-tasking (to a point) can both contribute to overall performance. A pair of studies appear in an MIT Sloan Management Review profile, What Makes Information Workers Productive. The studies authored by Sinan Aral (Leonard N. Stern School of Business) and Erik Brynjolfsson (MIT Sloan School of Management) look at productivity at a recruiting business, and find some surprising results.

The studies examine over 125,000 e-mail messages along with recruiting project completion and revenue generation.

One study discovers that increased use of e-mail increases, not decreases, the time it takes to finish a project. However, in these cases, recruiters are multi-tasking across several projects at a time and ultimately finish more projects and generate more revenue. The turtles beat the hares. Beware a caveat - the authors warn of a limit to multi-tasking.

What's more, two other communication factors play a role in the habits of the most productive recruiters.

1. Social Network centrality: Those recruiters who both multi-tasked and were in the center of a lot of e-mail flow were more productive than recruiters who had less internal connections.

2. Inflow vs. Outflows: Just like high performing subsidiaries which seek help from other subsidiaries of a large company (see Collaborating Across Boundaries), the recruiters who received more e-mail information from colleagues generate more revenue. In the study, recruiters receiving a small margin of 10 novel words above average generate $700 more revenue than average.

While e-mail is shown here to have its positive effects, hopefully the results of the study don't point a rose picture of the future of e-mail. The problem it creates is right there in the results. Points #1 and #2 above both point to the benefit received by the individuals that have access to more information and more people. By publishing the content of new information to a blog that's accessible to all the recruiters, information will flow more freely to more people and create a stronger, more inclusive, social network.