A study conducted by the Harvard Business School focused on this topic. Results showed that the time required to exercise one's discretion may be significant; hence productivity may suffer.
Rigid processes or discretion?
Some organisations require tasks be taken care of in a particular order, precisely for the sake of productivity. For example, when an application is being coded, the development is often carried out in a way that follows a given, sequential process.
Professionals are gaining increasingly more freedom over their working time. Prescribed schedules may be followed or they can deviate and complete their tasks in a different order.
Erosion of productivity
Virtual work is rising and therefore it is easier for employees to be more independent. However, when employees deviate from a prescribed task schedule, it has rather negative impacts on productivity. Surprisingly, it makes no difference how experienced the employee is.
In the afore-mentioned study, some 2.4 million diagnoses derived from a radiological services firm were used. Doctors at this firm sequentially read and diagnosed results provided by X-rays, ultrasounds and other means of medical monitoring.
Researchers found doctors would prioritise tasks they expected to complete faster. Each radiologist had about five images in the processing queue. Company policy was based on the first-in-first-out rule. It turned out that deviating from the prescribed process would increase the time needed for reading an image by 13%.
Why is this so? The decision process takes longer than people would normally expect. Doctors who had to search and choose which task to complete next would simply lose time, as explained in an article on the quickbase.com website.
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