Reducing Multitasking in Your Projects: The Right Management Approach

Everyone is working. Nothing is moving fast enough.

This is the situation a manager in an electrical engineering design office faces every week. Five engineers, eight active projects, an endless stream of progress meetings. Everyone can describe precisely what they are working on. Nobody can say with confidence which project will be delivered on time.

The cause is not a lack of effort. It is not an organizational problem either. It is a systems problem.

When a project portfolio has no explicit priority rules, resources organize themselves — rationally at their own level, but incoherently at the global level. They shift from one task to another, respond to the urgency of the moment, adapt to each project manager's requests. This is forced multitasking, not chosen multitasking.

And forced multitasking is one of the most costly — and least visible — schedule destroyers in project management.

Why multitasking exists: an organizational cause, not an individual one

Before looking for solutions, it is worth understanding why multitasking takes hold — and why it persists despite everyone's good intentions.

The portfolio as the root of the problem

In an electrical engineering design office, the typical situation looks like this: five engineers shared across eight client projects. Each client believes their project is the priority — and they often have good reasons to think so. Each project manager defends their own deadlines and draws on the same resources.

Without an explicit priority at the portfolio level, resources do what seems reasonable: they respond to requests in the order they arrive, or to whoever applies the most pressure. This is not poor management. It is the absence of management at the right level.

Multitasking is not the cause of the problem. It is its symptom.

The invisible cost of context switching

Cognitive science research is unambiguous on this point: every context switch has a cost. Moving from one task to another requires a ramp-up period — finding the thread again, remembering where things stood, rebuilding the concentration the work requires.

In a technical design environment, this cost is particularly high. An engineer working on a complex electrical schematic cannot interrupt their thinking every two hours without paying a price in quality and time.

Eliyahu Goldratt, in Critical Chain (1997), formalized this mechanism: uncontrolled multitasking extends total project duration not marginally, but structurally. A resource juggling three projects does not deliver three times faster — it delivers all three more slowly.

What multitasking costs

Context ramp-up time, concentration errors, accumulated decision fatigue.

What it produces

Projects that all move slowly, with none of them truly finishing.

What it conceals

The absence of an explicit priority at the portfolio level — the real structural cause.

The domino effect in multi-project environments

In an engineering design office, projects are not independent. They compete for the same resources. When an engineer is pulled from one project to another deemed more urgent, the first project slows — without anyone having formally decided to sacrifice it.

This silent slowdown is one of the most frequent causes of delay in multi-project environments. Projects slip not because an unforeseeable event occurred, but because resources were fragmented without explicit arbitration.

For a deeper look at the structural mechanisms behind these delays, the guide on why projects are always late covers these dynamics in full.

What the executive can decide: three portfolio-level levers

Reducing multitasking starts at the top. As long as the portfolio rules do not change, teams will keep juggling — regardless of their good intentions.

Lever 1 — Limit the number of simultaneously active projects (WIP)

This is the most counterintuitive lever — and the most effective.

The natural temptation is to launch all projects as soon as resources seem available. Every client is waiting. Every project seems urgent. The result: everything starts at once, resources are immediately fragmented, and nobody really moves forward.

The WIP (Work In Progress) rule proposes the opposite: only launch a new project when real capacity allows, particularly by accounting for the load on the most constrained resource.

In practice, in a five-engineer design office, this may mean: no more than three or four projects in active phase simultaneously. The others wait their turn — not because they are less important, but because launching them now would slow everything down.

Fewer parallel projects = each project moves faster = total deliveries happen sooner.

This principle is demonstrable. It is the foundation of Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM), which organizes project launches around the availability of the constrained resource — not around simultaneous client demands.

Lever 2 — Sequence assignments on the constrained resource

In every portfolio, there is a resource whose availability determines the progress of most projects. In an electrical engineering design office, this is often the only engineer qualified on a specific type of equipment, or the technical lead whose sign-off is required before any fabrication begins.

This resource is called the constrained resource. As long as it is in multitasking mode, all projects that depend on it slow down — even those whose other tasks are progressing normally.

The key management decision is straightforward: explicitly sequence the constrained resource's assignments, project by project, rather than letting it juggle several topics simultaneously.

In practice:

1. 1

   Identify which resource is simultaneously requested by the greatest number of projects.

2. 2

   Decide in which order that resource works on projects — one critical task at a time.

3. 3

   Communicate this sequence to the whole team, so everyone knows which project takes priority on that resource.

4. 4

   Reassess the sequence regularly — but do not change it at every urgent request without measuring the impact on other projects.

This sequence becomes the portfolio's real priority rule. It no longer depends on the pressure of the moment or a client's insistence — it follows from an explicit, shared decision.

For a deeper look at the data-driven prioritization method (buffer consumption, load, progression), the guide on how to prioritize multiple projects with shared resources describes the three signals to monitor.

Lever 3 — Make priority visible and stable for the whole team

Multitasking thrives in ambiguity. When nobody knows with certainty which project should come first, each team member arbitrates on their own — based on what they see, what they are asked, or what generates the least friction in the short term.

The stability of priority is as important as its existence. A priority that changes every two days is not a priority — it is an additional source of multitasking and confusion.

Implicit priority

Everyone arbitrates on their own. The loudest project wins. Resources fragment without any formal decision.

Explicit and stable priority

The whole team knows which project comes first. Trade-offs are documented. Changes are measured before being applied.

In practice, making priority visible does not require a sophisticated tool to start. A simple board displayed during team meetings, showing projects ranked by priority with the constrained resource identified, is enough to change the dynamic.

What matters is that everyone — engineers, project managers, leadership — shares the same reading of the situation.

What the project manager can do: three team-level rules

Changing portfolio rules takes time. In the meantime, project managers have levers of their own. Here is what they can put in place with their team, starting now.

Rule 1 — Finish before starting

This is the simplest rule to state and the hardest to maintain. It requires resisting the temptation to start a new task as soon as a blocker appears on the current one.

In electrical design, the typical blocker looks like this: an engineer is waiting for client information to finalize a schematic. Rather than waiting, they start a task on another project. When the information arrives, they have to re-enter the context of the first project — and are often already committed to the second.

The "finish before starting" rule does not mean sitting idle when blocked. It means immediately signaling the blocker, so the project manager can intervene and unblock the situation, rather than letting the resource silently shift to another topic.

Rule 2 — Signal the blocker, do not work around it

Forced multitasking is often a rational response to an unresolved blocker. A resource that cannot move forward on its task finds something else to do — that is logical. But in doing so, it makes the blocker invisible to the project manager.

The rule is clear: when a task is blocked, the first action is to report it — not to switch to something else.

This shift in posture requires a team culture in which signaling a blocker is not seen as admitting failure, but as an act of collective responsibility. It is the project manager's role to build that culture — by responding quickly to signals and never penalizing someone for raising a problem early.

Rule 3 — Each team member reports what they still have left to do

This is one of the most differentiating — and least intuitive — practices that KairoProject applies directly.

In most tools and progress meetings, the question asked is: "What have you done?" That is a backward-looking question. It looks in the rearview mirror. It says nothing about what will happen in the coming days.

The right question is different: "How much time do you still need to finish this task?"

This remaining work logic — rather than completed work — is fundamental for two reasons.

First, it anticipates rather than documents. If an engineer estimates they still need five days on a task that was due in two, the project manager knows today — not in two days when the delay is already a fact.

Second, it decentralizes the flow of information. In many teams, a single person — often the project manager — centralizes and updates progress. This concentration creates a dependency and a risk: if that person is absent or overloaded, information stops flowing.

When each team member is responsible for updating their own remaining work estimate, information is fresher, more accurate, and more distributed. The project manager is no longer the bottleneck of progress tracking.

KairoProject is built around this logic: each project participant directly reports what they still have left to do on their tasks, without going through an intermediary. The system automatically recalculates buffer status and critical chain tension from these decentralized updates.

CCPM as a framework: connecting both levels

The levers described in this guide — limited WIP, sequencing on the constrained resource, decentralized remaining work reporting — are not isolated practices. They form a coherent system, grounded in the principles of Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM).

CCPM, developed by Eliyahu Goldratt in Critical Chain (1997), starts from the same observation: multitasking is not an individual discipline problem, it is a consequence of how the portfolio is organized. Its response is structural: identify the constrained resource, organize the flow around it, and protect overall progress through collective buffers rather than individual margins.

In an electrical engineering design office, this logic concretely changes how trade-offs happen:

• when a client asks to accelerate a project delivery, the answer is no longer intuitive — it is readable in the buffer state and the constrained resource's load
• when an engineer is requested on two projects simultaneously, the priority is already decided — it does not depend on who applies the most pressure that morning
• when a project slows down, the signal is visible before the delay becomes irreversible

To understand how the critical chain calculates this sequence based on real resource constraints, the guide on what is CCPM details the core mechanisms — buffers, constrained resource, staggering.

What this changes in a design office's day-to-day

Back to our electrical engineering design office. Five engineers, eight projects. Here is what the situation looks like before and after implementing these rules.

This is not a radical transformation that requires months of training. It is a rule change — at the portfolio level first, at the team level next.

Going further

Forced multitasking is one of the areas where method and tool come together most directly. KairoProject is designed to make visible the tensions that multitasking generates — constrained resource load, buffer consumption, projects under pressure — and to let every participant contribute to management clarity, rather than simply experiencing it.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Critical Chain, North River Press, 1997 — the foundational reference for CCPM and its analysis of multitasking as a flow destroyer. See on Google Books
• Eliyahu M. Goldratt & Jeff Cox, The Goal, North River Press, 1984 — the founding work on the Theory of Constraints. Learn more
• PMI, Pulse of the Profession — the Project Management Institute's annual report on project success rates. View PMI reports
• chaine-critique.com — French-language reference resource on the critical chain method