Say you have four things to get done in the next five days. Are you better doing a little bit of each every day or doing one thing at a time until it’s done? My opinion is you’re better prioritising and getting to 100% on the most important things first rather than getting to 80% on multiple tasks but not having anything actually finished.

If you do one task at a time you can give it the full focus until it’s done or you get blocked. Less time context switching means more time concentrating on the work in front of you. There’s a danger though, if the higher priority tasks take longer than expected you might not get the final tasks even started. Better to discover that early on so you can decide how to deal with it. If you find out last minute that something will take longer because you were making slower progress on four things at once you won’t have that opportunity.

Are you context switching too much? Could you re-arrange your work so that you get more time to get to 100% on the most important work?