Bad multitasking
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Bad multitasking is multitasking that is unnecessarily wasteful. It is generally used to describe the inefficient juggling of project tasks or activities by those working on a project. Context switching overheads are the main source of problems with excessive multitasking. Additionally, multitasking tends to increase the lead time for each step as the person juggling tasks works multiple times on different tasks before they are finished. For example, assume you have three tasks - A, B, and C - each of which take 10 days to complete. If someone works on each task in turn for 5 days at a time, then task A is completed after 20 days, task B after 25 days, and task C after 30 days. The lead time for each step doubles!
This concept is similar to the concept of thrashing as used in computer science.
