What if your company outlawed multitasking?
“If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.”
Let that anonymous quotation set the tone. Now here’s a simple set of questions for you as I try desperately vainly manfully to get back into the flow of things after a delightful holiday weekend with my family:
- What if you stopped multitasking altogether?
- What if your company “outlawed” multitasking — for example by forbidding BlackBerries in meetings?
- What if you turned off your e-mail throughout the day?
- What if you radically reduced the number of things you worked on in a day, but increased the time and intensity you gave to each task?
What gets me thinking of this? This post from Jon Lebkowsky, this one from Josh Waitzkin (via Tim Ferriss), and, while we’re at it, this golden oldie from yours truly.
And while we’re at it, you’d also be well served to consider Kathy Sierra’s “Multitasking Makes Us Stupid?” and Joel Spolsky’s “Human Task Switches Considered Harmful.” Mind you that Sierra’s piece comes from 2006 and Spolsky’s comes from 2001. It’s not like these findings are new — but they’re more of a problem than ever, at least from the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen.
What say you?
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Related posts:
- Multitasking = cognitive hell.
- Productivity tip: Batch Processing.
- Book review: Organized for Success, by Stephanie Winston
- Once again: Do Not Multitask.
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Photo (of hares, not rabbits) by Jim Champion, used under a CC-Share Alike license.
Category: Management, The business brain, The working lifeIf you liked this post, please consider subscribing to the RSS feed so you can receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.
8 Comments so far
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I disagree with your premise to a degree. We are natural multitaskers; our bodies are doing a million functions at any one time: breathing, pumping blood, moving muscles, thinking, digesting food, etc. It is in our DNA to do multiple tasks simultaneously AND successfully. The issue isn’t multitasking itself, rather what the multiple tasks are at any one time.
Using my example, the bodies parts are distinct, each doing its own thing in concert with the other. Whereas, work multitasking involves several of the same components, computer (blog, email, twitter, etc.), phone (call, VM, leaving msgs, etc.), etc. We can certainly drive and hold a conversation, but driving and dialing, eating or texting is dangerous because we’re trying to use the same hands to do everything.
Multitasking in itself isn’t bad, how we do it needs improvement. My grandmother raised 11 children, not one ever got in trouble and she multitasked as a way of life with that many folks.
It’s the “hows” in life that are complex.
ShannonRenee — I agree completely that “It’s the ‘hows’ in life that are complex.” I agree also with the praise for your grandmother.
BUT, the biological example of parallel physical processes is a long way — isn’t it? — from what we typically mean when we say “multitasking.” Breathing and other autonomic functions are handled without conscious thought, and something like walking is handled nearly at that level because it is so automatic.
Consider, also, your driving example. If I’m rolling down a West Texas highway on a clear day, “driving” mostly means steering the car through the occasional gentle curves in the road. The cruise control handles the speed, and since visibility is practically unlimited and traffic almost nil, there’s not much to think about. Therefore it’s easy for me to listen to a book on tape, play “I spy” games with the kids, or whatever.
But what if I’m driving through the middle of Dallas during rush hour, in a thunderstorm? The radio is off and I tell the kids, “Don’t talk now — Daddy has to concentrate.” Even as a passenger, if I were riding with you, I’d take one look at the road and clam up, too, because I know that *that* kind of traffic requires genuine concentration.
A couple of things germane to this topic have been demonstrated by research:
–Texting while driving isn’t just dangerous because we’re trying to use the same hands to do everything, but because texting takes up mental bandwidth. If I’m on I-20 between Big Spring and Midland, maybe I can spare that bandwidth. Driving in rush hour, not so much.
–Unless one of the tasks at hand really *is* virtually automatic/brainless (walking, washing dishes, driving on an empty road), the human brain does not handle multiple tasks simultaneously at the conscious level. It may handle multiple tasks in a very short span of time (like your grandmother did with 11 kids), but it does so by *rapid switching* between tasks.
That switching comes with costs attached. And my argument is that we impose these costs upon ourselves constantly. And needlessly.
Vaguely related, but I knew you would appreciate:
Twitter is the Wonderbread of intellectual nutrition
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-9950703-16.html?tag=bnpr
Thanks for the link, KK. Asay sets up an untenable — or at least unnecessary — dichotomy between Twitter and literature. I tweet a lot AND I read serious literature. I derive benefits from both. His view is overly simplistic.
I agree — it’s simplistic. But hey, when you have a deadline for a 200-word blog post, you do what you can with the hot topic of the day. :)
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