Barriers to Productivity: Multitasking

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

The myth of multitasking. Refutation of the myth

The main obstacle to productivity for many people is that they believe in increasing their productivity through multitasking. To test the truth of this myth, I suggest you conduct a simple experiment. For this we need a stopwatch and a piece of paper.

Mark Twain said that: "There is Lies, blatant lies and statistics." I will rephrase it as follows: "There are lies, blatant lies and multitasking."

Multitasking is worse than lying. The problem with multitasking lies in the fact that multitasking has become a kind of element of modern culture and is calmly accepted by people as the norm. Nowadays, it is generally accepted that the more simultaneous tasks you solve, the more productive you look in your eyes and in the eyes of those around you and your colleagues.

The whole subtlety lies in the fact that our brain cannot work simultaneously with several tasks and it is forced to quickly switch from one task to another (there is Miller's number: 7 ± 2 semantic units).

Multitasking = the cost of switching between tasks. There, back continuously.

Negative consequences of multitasking

1. When working in multitasking mode, the time required to complete tasks increases significantly. One business owner complained that it took her a long time to complete simple tasks: she was simultaneously writing a letter to her client, giving instructions to her assistant, and talking on the phone with a supplier. And on these 3 tasks she spent 1 hour of time (until she completed the last task). But when she followed the recommendations and separated the tasks from one another, it turned out that a phone call took her 7 minutes, a conversation with an assistant took 3 minutes, and writing a letter to a client took 3 minutes. Total: 3 tasks were successfully completed in 13 minutes.

For this reason, many people at the end of the working day have a feeling when they feel exhausted: they have been running around all day, saving the world, solving a bunch of issues, and the result is minimal, almost nothing is really completed and is not completed.

You juggled tasks and darted between them, but brought almost nothing to its logical conclusion or to an acceptable result.

2. The quality of problem solving. When you continually switch from task to task, the quality of your work degrades due to the very high probability of making mistakes in each of their tasks running in parallel. How often did it happen that you delegated a simple task to someone, while giving simple and clear instructions for its implementation, and the task has not yet been completed (or is constantly being redone). Do you think that the person to whom you delegated this task is impenetrably stupid? (although this happens). This is most likely a symptom that this person is multitasking.

3. Multitasking increases your stress levels. An increased level of stress has been relevant recently in big cities and large offices (open space, which are gaining fashion in our country and which the West has already abandoned or seeks to do). Even if you are doing very simple tasks or solving simple tasks, the stress level rises significantly. This topic is well written in Leo Babauta's book, which I translated and can be downloaded from the Internet ("Focus free"). If you are interested, I can give a link at the end).

The most obvious consequences of multitasking are listed here. There are still a lot of non-obvious consequences.

All this has become so relevant for the reason that multitasking has begun to be accepted by people as normal and completely commonplace.