Multitasking: Asset or Liability?

Job descriptions seem to unquestioningly include the skill of multitasking as part of the basic foundation of a successful career, along with good communication skills and the ability to work as part of a team. Indeed, brief commercials such as the following imply that people are simply inefficient if they lack the ability to multitask throughout the day: Multitask Commercial.

However, the praises being showered on multitasking are inconsistent with wisdom that has been shared for generations. A common African proverb, for example, is, "If you chase two rats, you catch none." Over 2000 years ago, Pubilius Syrus wrote, "To do two things at once is to do neither." In the 1700s, Lord Chesterfield wrote to his son, "There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time."

A number of recent research studies are also suggesting that people simply cannot multitask as well as they think they can. Earlier this year, Clare Baldwin wrote, "Researchers…were looking for the secret to good media multitaskers but instead found broad-based incompetence." Dave Crenshaw published an entire book last year called, The Myth of Multitasking: How "Doing It All" Gets Nothing Done.

Walter Kirn’s multitasking almost killed him. He wrote about his near brush with death when he ran off the road while trying to access a photo on his camera phone, adding:

"It was interesting to me — in retrospect, after having done some reading about the frenzied activity of the multitasking brain — how late in the process my prefrontal cortex, where our cognitive switchboards hide, changed its focus from the silly phone (Where did it go? Did it slip between the seats?…) to the important matter of a steel fence post sliding spear-like across my hood …"

Although it is understandable why people are trying to keep up with our fast-paced world by trying to do everything at once, "multitasking" might turn out to be nothing more than a phase in our society before we return to the time-honored time management principles that have held true for centuries: prioritize and focus.

DrDebBrown.com