Multitasking
I started my professional career working part-time at a small, 10-people telecommunication firm. I was the only software engineer in the company, automating the well-known manual work and reporting directly to the owner. Since then, I have worked at many jobs—including my own start-up company where there were only the founders at the beginning and reporting to our investors and the CEO of the company, which acquired us at the end. My current software job is with an enterprise firm. There was and still is one obvious flaw of all those companies: Multitasking. It is self-evident because I’ve got to experience it first-hand every day. Whenever I attend a meeting, there is always someone doing something on the side while still pretending to listen to whoever speaks.
I want to emphasize the word pretending because most of the meetings are useless for at least one of the attendees. The logical conclusion of this thinking would be that I should be okay with the bored attendee doing something productive on the side. Wrong. What’s rational is to say no when received the meeting invitation—but we’ll talk about saying no in a future post. Useless meetings aside, it’s also common for active participators to focus when talking and do something else when someone else is talking. The whole act is the opposite of active listening
—which may not only be the best way but the only way of having productive meetings.Following the meeting example in work life, we can also take our conversations with our friends as an example from our daily lives. We don’t listen to each other. We hear them, yes, but don’t listen. I cannot say that I always actively listen to one another, but I experienced this from others enough that every time I silently screamed inside. Why don’t you put your phone aside and listen to me? Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler, the authors of the Communication Book
, try to provide a reason:Most people like to talk about themselves. This leads to us not listening any more, but simply waiting for our turn to speak.
And in the end, we swipe through social media while unconsciously pretending to listen to our friends, partners, or relatives. We don’t pretend on purpose; we merely try to multitask, and we fail miserably.
Artist: Gülfemin Buğu Tekcan — cosmodotart
Communication is not the only medium we try to leverage our multitasking skills, but it is a very obvious one. Since it includes multiple people, it’s easy to notice, although you wouldn’t think so when doing something on the side. While multitasking on a multi-people setup hurts the setup's purpose, multitasking can be much more dangerous when it doesn’t include another person. Suppose you’re working on something and you got a notification from a colleague asking for your help. It requires a small effort, so you decide to do it on the side and make your colleague happy. You multitask. Let’s say you choose to focus on your work first, instead. But now you have one more thing you need to do after you finish what you have in hand. You start thinking about it at the back of your head. There: You multitask. Whatever you decide to do, you started multitasking when you got distracted by the notification.
So you started multitasking. What’s the fuss? Well, if you’re okay with sub-optimal outcomes, there is no fuss. According to the American Psychological Association, research shows that multitasking lowers our efficiency and productivity
. It also drives us to make more mistakes. While we are trying our best to squeeze everything into a fixed timeframe to be more productive, we pay less attention to all the tasks we are attending to. Neuroscientist Dan Levitan also adds that multitasking promotes stress and can temporarily drop the IQ by ten points. The notion of multitasking is counter-productive by nature: If we focus on those two or more tasks separately, we could finish all of them earlier, with fewer errors, and without stressing ourselves unnecessarily.What’s more, is that people believe they are good at multitasking. However, Michael K. Gardner, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Utah, says that people overestimate their multitasking abilities.
According to Gardner, there may be a small percentage of people, like one percent of the general population, who are super multitaskers. So if you are one of every two people who think they’re good at multitasking, you may want to think again—unfortunately, the odds are not in your favor.While trying to fight off multitasking, I found a couple of helpful ways to turn things to my benefit:
Creating a distraction-free environment: By turning off notifications or silencing my phone, you can retain your focus on whatever you’re doing. If you don’t see your colleague's ping, there wouldn’t be a request meddling in your brain. By the same logic, if you leave your phone somewhere without your arm’s reach, you can engage in a meaningful conversation with your friend.
Mixing complex and simple tasks: If you have to multitask, at least make sure that you’re dealing with one complex task at any given moment. “Multitasking while doing natural tasks like eating and walking are much easier than more complicated tasks like texting while driving.”
Good examples are having a conversation while doing the dishes or listening to an audiobook while jogging outside.
There is one more aspect to multitasking: Possible benefits. While multitasking increases the number of mistakes and stress, it can lower the time needed to complete a task in certain conditions. A study done by Gloria Mark, Daniela Gudith, and Ulrich Klocke has found that multitasking can be perceived as beneficial if the tasks' context is the same or similar.
The study is originally based on interruptions, but the task switching is the same. You may be able to finish the tasks in a lower total amount of time, definitely a benefit. However, it’s also essential to read this outcome with a grain of salt since the added stress might still waste your time over the long run.Do you multitask at work or in your daily lives? Do you happen to perceive yourself as a super multitasker? How is your experience with multitasking? Let me know in the comments.
“Active listening refers to a pattern of listening that keeps you engaged with your conversation partner in a positive way. It is the process of listening attentively while someone else speaks, paraphrasing and reflecting back what is said, and withholding judgment and advice.” from How to Practice Active Listening
The Communication Book on Amazon
Multitasking: Switching costs on American Psychological Association
The myth of multitasking: Research says it makes us less productive and increases mistakes by Karen L. Pace on Michigan State University Extension
The Perils of Multitasking by William R. Klemm Ph.D. on Psychology Today
How to Multitask Without Breaking Your Brain by Rebecca Fishbein
To Multitask or Not to Multitask published on University of Southern California
The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress by Gloria Mark from the University of California, Irvine and Daniela Gudith & Ulrich Klocke from the Humboldt University, Berlin.