There's an excellent article on the effect of task switching over at coding horror. As the leader of a small (4-5 people) team I spend most of my time task-switching, between doing management activities, supporting our existing products, planning future activities, reviewing designs or code with the team not to mention the odd bit of development or technical investigations that still come my way. There's little wonder that I go home most nights wondering if I've actually achieved anything at all that day. As a team we develop and maintain a large number of related products, and have recently been given assurance that our current main project focus is one of the most important to the company. And yet, I still find extra bits and pieces of work being pushed into the team to work on, "it won't take up too much time and then you can focus on the main project", because our customers (external) have been promised something, or it's really important etc. I'm planning to print this graph out, laminate it and carry it to meetings just in case the "can you just" or "I've got something that I need your team to look at" sentences begin...