Multitasking Madness

I was at a reception last night for the UC Irvine School of Information and Computer Sciences (www.ics.uci.edu) and had the opportunity to chat with many of the professors there who are doing fascinating research. Gloria Mark told me about some work her student, Victor M. González, is doing to study the work habits of software developers, software architects, and software managers. He's found that the average person naturally juggles 11 different tasks at one time and switches between them every 4-1/2 minutes (not counting time in meetings). It's too early for any conclusions, but I'll be interested to see what recomendations they make in the way of new tools and such that bow to the inevitible and support this behavior, perhaps even allowing us to juggle more.