The Brilliance of Single-Tasking: Awesomeness Chapter 2
The second chapter of awesome book on awesomeness
Here is the second part in my 30-some part (?) series regurgitating republishing the chapters from my 2016 book: Awesomeness: An Amateur Potpourri of a How-To Guide.
Part 1: Weekly goals, can be found here.
Part 3: Speed Reading, can be found here.
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The Brilliance of Single-Tasking
Multitasking is myth.
Yes, it is widely considered to be a critical skill in today’s frantic workplace. Indeed, almost every resume that crosses my desk states that one of the person’s many skills is that he or she is a great “multitasker.”
My eyes have come to roll at the sight of such “skills” as I long ago reached the conclusion that there are two types of people in this world; bad multitaskers and horrible multitaskers. Gary Keller provides a great analysis of this in his short book The One Thing. As he notes,
“Every time we try to do two or more things at once, we’re simply dividing up our focus and dumbing down all of the outcomes in the process. [And to] Bounce between one activity and another you lose time as your brain reorients to the new task. Those milliseconds add up. Researchers estimate that we lose 28 percent of an average workday to multitasking ineffectiveness.” [1]
Thus, Keller accurately describes multitasking as “one of the great myths of our time.” Perhaps someday I will see one of those resumes more accurately state that the applicant is “great at wasting time by switching from one task to another before finishing the first one.”
Personally speaking, a while back I finally made it a major goal of mine to not multitask. Since then, my productivity has increased dramatically. In particular, the projects that “I can just never get back to” don’t seem to be around much anymore. Said projects either get finished, or don’t get started in the first place. So I have come to call this process single-tasking.
Single-tasking focuses the brain on finishing things. Our brains just don’t really multitask, no matter how much we would like them to or how much we try to force them to. Instead, when someone attempts to multitask, his or her brain just goes back and forth between the two separate tasks and is unable to focus on either. This leads to frustration or a feeling of being overwhelmed which then leads to procrastination. Or perhaps we should call it zero-tasking.
Indeed, Wikipedia’s entry on the subject sums up the research on multitasking quite well,
“Since the 1990s, experimental psychologists have started experiments on the nature and limits of human multitasking. It has been shown multitasking is not as workable as concentrated times. In general, these studies have disclosed that people show severe interference when even very simple tasks are performed at the same time, if both tasks require selecting and producing action (e.g., (Gladstones, Regan & Lee 1989) (Pashler 1994)). Many researchers believe that action planning represents a “bottleneck”, which the human brain can only perform one task at a time. Psychiatrist Edward M. Hallowell has gone so far as to describe multitasking as a “mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously as effectively as one.” [2]
The Wikipedia article even points out that some researchers believe it is impossible to learn new information while multitasking. To multitask is literally to handicap yourself. Humans simply don’t do more than one thing at the same time, no matter what your resume says.
And when you really come to think about it, this becomes rather obvious (as long as you are not thinking about something else at the same time, of course). Taking one task on with your full attention allows you to, well; take on that task with your full attention. And thus, you can defeat whatever foe lies before you by putting your all into it. Otherwise, even rather simple tasks can pile up on top of each other and become a disorienting blob of confusion that leads first to frustration, then to working on something else, them coming back to the original project, trying to reorient yourself, feeling overwhelmed and finally, giving in to procrastination.
Single-tasking is, unfortunately, not as easy to do as to explain. There’s not just some switch to flip. This is especially true for managers who have subordinates asking questions of them at all times about a variety of different subjects or for those in customer service being barraged by various customers. Still, whenever possible, it’s best to focus on one thing and one thing only. And when going back and forth between things is unavoidable, it’s best to find ways to mitigate this problem as much as possible.
Here are some handy methods I’ve used to do this:
Scheduling Distractions: Schedule times to deal with such issues and make sure everyone knows that unless it’s an emergency, save your questions for that time.
Avoid Distractions: Try to have a relatively quiet work area.
Lists: Utilize to do lists (or Getting Things Done® to be discussed in chapter 5)
Remove Clutter: Keep your computer, work area and desk clean (cluttered desk equals cluttered mind).
Change Completely: If you must divert your attention to a new matter, put the old task to bed for a while before returning to it.
But whatever you do, don’t settle for the easy way out, which is mindless multitasking. All kidding aside, what I would like to see on those resumes is something like “Can avoid the temptation of multitasking and focus on a single task at a time until it is complete.”
[1] Gary Keller, The One Thing, Bard Press, 4/1/2013, Pg. 50
[2] “Human multitasking”, Wikipedia.org, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_multitasking, Accessed 4/12/2015
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