Do you feel sometimes that you are spinning in mud, given the myriad commitments you have? Don’t you sometimes feel that you are getting nowhere fast? In this fast-paced world we are expected to be effective and efficient and one of the ways we achieve this is through multitasking.
Every recruiter includes the item “Demonstrate your ability to multitask!” in her interview schedule. Doing tasks concurrently is a critical and necessary skill. You must be able to split your attention while concentrating on the many things you are attending to.
This is a taller order than many of us realize.
The human brain is phenomenal. It will rise to the demands we place on it. However, it is not a computer. It gets tired.
Growing up we were admonished for trying to do too many things at once. At school and at home we were trained to focus, to be definite about our purposes and to be attentive – in short, to be present. We graduated to juggling: watching television and doing homework simultaneously.
So the expectation to multitask at work is a reasonable requirement. Today’s “digital native” job applicant is certainly equal to the task. Businesses rely on the multitasker to increase productivity. We engage appendages like smart phones and standard office auxiliaries like combo printers to help us meet the organization’s goals.
Leveraging this competency can also bolster a company’s competitive advantage.
Multitasking is the concurrent performance of several jobs by a computer. We learnt this term from the IT world and transplanted it into our human experience. It also means having multiple capabilities that you can leverage to your own career advantage redounding to the benefit of your employer or your own business. A more common application is being able to work on several tasks at the same time.
So we have uncannily turned ourselves into computers. At the risk of limiting our marvellous brain, I must challenge “Doesn’t this activity reduce our control over self and our presence among others?” The reason I pose the question relates to the worrisome externalities that prevent the “human computer” from meeting productivity targets while we employ multitasking techniques consistently.
Our failings include forgetfulness, preoccupation, fatigue, overlooking details, confusion, scattered thinking, stress, over-commitment, lack of enjoyment, and being permanently plugged in.
A friend said that her habit of multitasking left her feeling out of control. While she accomplished a lot, she often felt that her responsibilities dictated her pace. She said she never felt present. That thought piqued my interest. Research shows that 92 per cent of our thoughts are either future-focused or attempts to improve our past.
So if we are hardly attending to the present, it follows that juggling many things at once will not improve this statistic. Many of us are not attuned to what we are feeling in our bodies from moment to moment so we sometimes fail to recognize that we are stressed.
High achievers get a “high” from multitasking. It is an experience of peak performance for them but as exhilarating as that may be, the able high achiever is often stressed.
Enter “mono-tasking”?
One hazard of workplace multitasking is that it spills into our home lives. Mono-tasking means “why do it today when you can do it tomorrow?’ It means slowing down.
It means “stop BlackBerry-messaging while you are conversing with me!”
It means being attentive and single-minded to the little person tapping your knee for attention.
While chatting on the phone over the weekend, a friend reported that she could not help but tidy her side table while we were on the phone. She said that in response to my exclaiming that I had forgotten to garnish my soup, which I blamed on multitasking.
We laughed and then I reflected on the seriousness of constantly splitting our attention. I would have been more effective paying attention to one thing at a time.
Have we plugged into the matrix without consideration for ourselves? Have we turned into fidgety adults while reprimanding our own children for the same?
We are experiencing a constant drive to fill our moments with activity, so long as we perceive a “vacancy”.
