Common sense tells us that the best way to get things done more efficiently is to “work harder.” Things rarely pan out this way, especially not in an economy powered by knowledge and service workers who can’t necessarily improve performance by working longer hours or exhausting themselves.

The closer we look at common management “strategies,” the more we discover that keeping busy is avoiding productivity, and multitasking is really just procrastination. It’s time to turn things around, and realize that efficient teams aren't “busy,” they’re productive.

A Scattered Team is No Team At All

The biggest problem with businesses that “overcommit” is an issue with team cohesiveness. When every employee is committed to multiple obligations, the entire team is never gathered together in one place at one time to discuss the state of things, to plan, or to respond to disruptions.

Management intuitively understands that when a project becomes a top priority, it needs a dedicated task force of people who focus exclusively on that project. Other teams are advised to avoid distracting this task force. Perhaps more crucially, if anybody on that task force finds themselves in a situation where they can’t take any action right away, they are usually advised not to get busy with anything else. It’s not worth the cost of catching them up later or distracting them with other projects.

It is a bizarre disconnect that management turns to this model whenever an emergency erupts, yet they typically take the opposite approach during day-to-day operations.

Most of us are fully aware that communication breakdowns are one of the most common sources of inefficiency and error in business operation. Projects fall behind schedule because plans were misinterpreted, goals were never made clear, and employees who needed to know about crucial changes were left out of the loop.

The most powerful way to cut down on these communication breakdowns is to simply ensure that teams stay united. Each project gets one team. No exceptions. When there isn’t room, there isn’t room. It’s always better to put a project on the backlog than to overcommit and end up going over time and over budget. Mixing and matching projects with scattered teams leads to confusion, miscommunication, and error. Wasted resources are the inevitable result.

When possible, you keep teams in the same room. Regardless, it’s absolutely vital that they share a common communication interface. It should be simple enough to use without training, and it should keep everybody up to date.

Being Busy isn’t the Same as Being Productive

That companies are called “businesses” is a quirk of the English language, and maybe it’s had some impact on the way we approach business itself. Whatever the reason, we possess a hatred of idleness so powerful that it clouds our judgment as managers.

The truth is that it doesn’t matter how “hard” you work. It doesn’t matter how busy you are, or how long your work day is. All that matters is how much value you produce in the aggregate. White there are times when working harder or longer means you will produce more value, these simply aren’t the same thing.

Just Say No to Multitasking

This is the source of the problem, right here.

We already pointed out that over committing leads to scattered teams and poor communication. This is what happens when you try to multitask. You separate teams, people constantly need to bring each up back up to speed, and vital information gets lost in translation.

But multitasking doesn't just disrupt teams. It slows down the mind.

When a single person works on two tasks sequentially, instead of at the same time, they cut errors in half and cut total time by 30 percent. It takes time to switch between tasks, and even longer to achieve a state of “flow” where you are completing the task most efficiently. The lag time that comes from switching back and forth between tasks makes our brains work harder. That makes us feel like we’re getting more done, when in fact we’re just working harder to get sub-par results.

Furthermore, the constant exposure to new information, paradoxically, hinders creative thinking processes. One Harvard study investigated 9,000 people assigned to work on tasks for extended periods of time, versus people who switched back and forth between various tasks rapidly. Those who approached the tasks in fragments never achieved the kind of depth necessary to come up with innovative solutions.

Perhaps worst of all, multitasking is actually addictive. It allows us to escape truly challenging tasks by solving menial ones. This is despite the fact that multitasking elevates stress hormones and may ultimately be damaging to your health.

Unfortunately, most management disciplines make no effort to fight this addiction to multitasking. While some may institute rules against cell phone or Facebook use, they do nothing to combat the bigger problem of multitasking. In fact, most management disciplines encourage multitasking. They do so by committing workers to multiple projects at once, by disciplining workers who don’t look busy enough, and by rewarding workers who go out of their way to do menial tasks.

Multitasking is a drug. You need to kick the habit if you hope to escape the trap of looking busy and accomplishing nothing.