Microtasking

In today’s fast-paced world, it’s more important than ever to be productive. And one of the best ways to boost your productivity is by Microtasking.

Distractions are getting more common in the workplace.

It’s a morning on weekdays, you are highly motivated to complete the task, and you’re already making progress when a notification toggles your attention to a festival offer. You quickly check it and move to the website for the shopping, all the while getting further away from the original task. Probably you might be familiar with such scenarios.

Sometimes you postpone your tasks because you aren’t in the “mood” leads to a pile-up of work and results in stress and frustration.

The Project Managers and Team Leads often search for solutions to questions like, 

Which obstacle prevents a project from moving forward efficiently, quickly, and effectively? What can you do when interruptions occur? What are the ways to speed up the delivery of projects?

It’s not only them. Sometimes we even search for solutions to defend against procrastination and increase our productivity.

The solution for all of these is Microtasking. It’s an advanced upgrade for any development process. 

In this blog, We will explain everything you need to know about microtasking, including the benefits and how to do it effectively.

What is Microtasking?

Microtasking is the process of breaking work items into small tasks. It’s a way of working that helps you be more productive.

It is designed to foster creative flow but also improves individual and team productivity. Microtasking is several small, independent tasks that can assign to the team members within your project.

It is the process of breaking a project into discrete chunks or subtasks. Microtasking helps your creative process and makes working as a team more fluid, transparent and effortless.

A common approach to this advice is to focus on the actual task and become more efficient. Team members will stay focused on common goals and increase productivity if they ensure that work flows smoothly from one person to the next.

Anyways, Microtasking came into effect because of our distractions and procrastination. A study by UC Irvine found that modern offices suffer interruptions every 11 minutes, which suggests microtasking might help you become more resilient to interruptions.

A study found that 70% of distractions are due to social media.

Why do we procrastinate?

Procrastination is usual human behaviour. Everyone procrastinates at a time, and most of us usually repeat. 

A study says that approximately 80% of programmers procrastinate.

If you are a programmer, you will have found many ways to avoid doing things even though you know there is no point in delaying those tasks — however small and insignificant they seem at the time.

Microsoft Office has already implemented microtasks features that encourage users to complete those tasks whenever they get time.

You can identify snags in a task and flag them as you work. Additionally, it allows you to mail the link for any individual work to your team. 

As artificial intelligence (AI) is getting more advances, it looks set to dominate several fields in the coming years. It will give greater flexibility to workers and help them be more productive.

AI microtasking will help you break up large tasks into smaller ones and allows you to focus more on the task at hand instead of worrying about breaking up your work into smaller parts.

There is no secret that we are all procrastinators.

As work projects become more complex and the workforce gets challenged to be more productive, we must find ways to improve coordination and reduce waste in project delivery.

Know More About Microtasking:

There are two aspects of microtasking. One facet is corporate, while the other is creative. Corporate refers to the daily tasks that you perform for your employer. Creativity refers to the way to utilize microtasking.

Let’s understand this with some examples:

For Corporate:

Looking at the distractions of social media platforms, now Microsoft Research team has come up with the idea of inserting small word documents into users’ Facebook feeds. It will remind and encourage them to complete the work while they procrastinate. 

These pending tasks include editing work, tagging someone, and sending documents. AI will display these small tasks on employees’ Facebook feeds.

The program would display two or three lines that need to be edited or one comment from a document. It will allow employees to complete these Microtasks without switching tabs.

For Individuals:

You can take a Lyricist in the individual category. By default, they are microtasks. Have you ever witnessed a lyricist completing the lyrics for a song in a day? Instead, they segregate and complete it.

In such cases, AI is not involved, but the practice is the same. Applications like HabitHub, Loop, Productive and Todoist can help you with task management. They are beneficial for creating schedules and breaking down tasks.

Benefits of Microtasking:

#1- Developer Flow State for Optimal Performance:

A developer working on microtasks can disable all real-time communication tools, begin work on a task and finish it within the Pomodoro window. 

Once complete, the developer can disable real-time communication tools and start working on another task.

This cycle continues until all tasks get completed.

With this method, you capture the incredible scientific benefits of being in a flow state while ensuring that you save time between tasks.

Moreover, you can make better use of your time. When you work on one long task, you may find periods where you are waiting for something to happen (e.g. waiting for a file to download). By working on multiple small tasks simultaneously, you can better use your time and avoid wasting time.

Additionally, you can avoid decision fatigue. You may have to make decisions about how to proceed with the task. This can leads to decision fatigue, which can reduce your productivity. In microtasking, few decisions are to be made and can help you to avoid decision fatigue.

#2- Parallelization for teams made easy:

Microtasking is especially useful when you are working on a team project. It allows you to parallelize the work so that each team member can work on a different task. It makes the project go much faster and helps to avoid bottlenecks. 

Assigning small tasks to different developers becomes quicker when working on features as a team. A developer, for instance, will sometimes take on a long story and then work in isolation on the attributes.

A couple of days later, you might inquire about the feature and discover that it was “much bigger than expected and touched so many parts of the system.” A microtasking approach eliminates vast components by dividing them into minor elements that need to be worked on individually by each developer.

It makes it easy for all team members to swarm on the elements in each user story and tackle them as they come up during development.

#3- Easy to Monitor:

Among all the benefits, one of the most significant is it allows you to monitor your progress. When you complete an extensive task, it can be tough to track your approach. However, when you break a job into smaller pieces, it becomes much easier to monitor your progress and ensure that you are on track.

Let’s say a project manager should know about how development is going for the critical features that need to deliver. It will be easier for them to adjust scope and resource allocation when they have granular information about progress.

With microtasks, It’s easy to keep track of team members’ progress without interrupting them.

#4- Better Defined Tasks:

Microtasks provide a way to discover implementation details as you create stories.

During software development, all ignore discovery. As a result, countless surprises are inevitable during implementation. 

Microtasks prevent this by allowing you to create tickets that take less than 90 minutes of work unless you know the details of the implementation. 

Ways to take advantage of Microtasking:

Till now, we have discussed its implementation on a corporate scale. Let’s know how to execute it individually. 

If you are following microtasks, don’t forget these strategies.

#1- Make Action Plans:

If you are unfamiliar with a task, it is best to break it down into smaller steps. To streamline the planning process, identify vital steps and tasks and break them down into smaller steps.

For example, if you are assigned to learn a programming language. As you are unfamiliar with that, your first job will be to break your task into small steps. Then you need to work on those steps to complete it.

#2- Divide your attention:

Smartphones are commonly a source of distraction, especially when watching television or talking on the phone.

You can complete mundane tasks while using your phone as a source of entertainment, such as replying to an email while watching an ad.

#3-Organizing tasks:

Prioritize your tasks by complexity. Start with the simplest tasks and progress to the most complex.

Focus on easy tasks and avoid getting sidetracked by more complex ones until you have completed a complex project.

Concluding remarks:

Microtasking is a very effective way to handle small but time-consuming tasks. It improves the team’s productivity and frees up an individual’s time for other crucial tasks. 

Eventually, we focus on principal tasks, but microtasking helps to overcome this problem.

The ultimate goal of microtask is not to keep yourself busy. Instead, it’s a way to focus and bring motivation to your work. As we all know, motivation comes from the small moments of productivity.

Microtasks can also be divided among colleagues to make the task engrossing. Collaborative work produces more creative and less tedious results.