Useful Term: Multi-Blocking

Around this time in 2012, a co-worker asked what I was working on, that day. Then, as now (and much of my career up to that point), I was assigned multiple customers with projects and tasks for each. I said to him, "I'm multi-blocking". It's a term I've used to describe my work-style for a long time …but wasn't until the co-worker looked blankly at me when I used the term. It was at that point that I realized I'd possibly coined a new term.

To explain, "multi-blocking" is in a similar vein to multi-tasking, but different. It's the (necessary) habit of running multiple, concurrent projects, but letting "blockers" determine which project goals you're actively working towards at any given time. Which is to say, you work on a project until some dependency stops you, then hop onto the next most pressing project that isn't also blocked. You do this kind of task-switching until either every project available to work is blocked or, processes you previously set into motion to unblock other, previously-blocked tasks finally result in one or more of those other tasks unblocking.

Other interruptions to multi-blocking can be "suddenly critical" things that aren't on your project plans being dumped into your lap. These either get added to the multi-blocking queue or supersede everything in it. The big down-side of this working-model is when you reach a state where you're 100% blocked. Then, it's total frustration time. If this happens frequently enough, or you're given a superseding task that also blocks, it can cause a total freak-out of frustration and denial of satisfaction.

Sadly, I find that this is still my primary workstyle. Interestingly, it stands in stark contrast to how a low of my co-workers seem to work. For them, if something blocks, they frequently just sit around until someone higher up from them asks, "what are you working on," at which point they finally reveal, "I'm blocked because of…"  at which point the higher-up person finally knows, "oh… apparently I need to help you to get unblocked if I want you to be productive".