The Art of Multitasking

How does she do it? "It's easy," says Peterson. "I plan everything; I put everybody to work." She isn't kidding. Before one recent speech, a computer crash nearly ruined her evening when all of the slides for the presentation were lost. Instead of toiling alone deep into the night, however, Peterson made the recovery operation a family affair: She practiced her speech out loud while her husband retyped the slides onto his computer, her 10-year-old son manned the printer and copier, and her 6-year-old daughter collated the presentation as the pages rolled off the machine. The speech went off without a hitch.

Peterson applies the same principle at the office. Everyone on her more than 2,000-person staff knows exactly what role she expects them to play and the larger goal that the team needs to meet. "My top priority is developing the strategy for achieving my operation's goals and then laying out that vision to my team," says Peterson. Indeed, she's a tireless communicator, meeting individually with each of her 13 direct reports every two weeks.

When it comes to her electronic communications, Peterson applies that same no-nonsense approach. She argues that checking email is a task that will expand to fill whatever time you are willing to give it. So she delves into her inbox just twice a day -- once in the morning and again at night -- ruthlessly replying to, filing away, and discarding messages.

"I receive up to 300 messages a day, but usually, there are only about 40 that I need to save," she says. Those messages are answered and then filed into project-specific folders. The strategy works because her team knows the drill: If it's urgent, follow up the email with a phone call. Otherwise, send status reports via email and wait for Peterson's daily reply. Peterson's assistant, Debbie DePreste, prints out any long attachments for her to read offline.

Indeed, DePreste is Peterson's best weapon for keeping inefficiency at bay. The two are a symbiotic team, with Peterson planning and prioritizing and DePreste ensuring that nothing is able to fall through the cracks. DePreste never schedules early-morning meetings, since Peterson would likely be stuck in the Valley's infamous gridlocked traffic. Instead, Peterson uses the first hours of the day to make phone calls. She heads for work mid-morning, when traffic has settled down a bit.

But sometimes even the best-laid plans can go awry. At such moments, DePreste and Peterson fall back on a no-tech time-proven strategy that can work for any overtaxed executive: They use humor to deflate stress. "There are times when Marissa will angle for a better seat on a plane, even though she knows I booked it at the last second, and she's lucky to even get on the flight," says DePreste. "I'll tell her to chill -- and quit acting like a VP."

Alison Overholt (aoverholt@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company staff writer based in San Francisco.

Sidebar: Pardon the Interruption

Last year, Jodi Forlizzi's students rigged a sensor to her office door and linked it to the Web. When her door is open, that information flashes on the site, announcing to students that they are welcome to stop by. When the door is closed -- on the Web and in her physical office -- students know to leave her alone. "It's a simple device that came from our study of doors as barriers to interruption," says Forlizzi, an assistant professor of human-computer interaction and design at Carnegie Mellon University.

Forlizzi is fascinated by the questions of how and why busy people get interrupted -- and what might be done to minimize distractions. "Wireless devices, cell phones, laptops -- all of them beeping, ringing, flashing -- they make demands on our time and our attention," Forlizzi says. "That means that we have less time to do real knowledge work, and we spend more time on task work: answering messages and shuffling papers."

One of Forlizzi's least surprising observations: People are most prone to interruptions when they're on the phone. One of her more surprising recommendations, especially in a no-frills economy: Don't minimize the value of even a reasonably competent executive assistant. According to Forlizzi, M*A*S*H's Radar O'Reilly may come to symbolize the unsung heroes of overworked, underresourced offices everywhere. Of course, Forlizzi is also working on high-tech devices designed to help solve the problem of unproductive interruptions, such as sensors and "smart" fabrics in furniture. By tying that information to hypotheses such as, "When people have their feet up on the desk, they are more interruptible," Forlizzi hopes to make the workplace environment smarter about when people can and should be disturbed. It's either that, or hire your own Radar.

Sidebar: 6 Quick Tips on Managing Your Time

The best advice for mastering multitasking comes from executives on the front lines. Here's a cheat sheet with six of their hard-won lessons for moments when the workday gets a little too hectic.