Dropping the Fiction of Multitasking

While I like variety in my work, I’m a lousy multitasker. I’m at my best doing one thing at a time. Plus I need to build in a quick pause when I shift my brain from one kind of task to another.

Those characteristics should make me precisely the wrong kind of person to thrive in the modern working world. We’re told in a variety of ways that being able to multitask is the norm. You should be able to write memos while perusing a research report and checking email. It’s hard to have a meeting and not hear the click, click of people texting while they’re listening. And it’s hard to find a job posting that doesn’t ask for someone who is a multitasker (in addition to being a self-starter and entrepreneurial)

Well, multitasking is a crock.

Financial Crimes: One Reason There's No Justice at Justice

Three years after the financial crisis, not one of the big financial sleezemeisters that created the subprime mortgage machine has gone to jail. Plenty of people have lamented this basic fact. Sure, complicated financial crimes can be hard to prove, and weasel’s like this guy have money, but it’s hard to see that as much of an excuse. One major factor – one that doesn’t really get a lot of attention – is that the way prosecutors organized themselves to investigate the crimes set them up to fail.

Here’s how it worked: Despite the fact that the Southern District of New York (think Wall Street) had the most experience ferreting out accounting fraud, the Department of Justice basically handed out big cases as plums to different U.S. attorneys offices. Countrywide (the shady mortgage company now owned by Bank of America) went to Los Angeles; Washington Mutual went to Seattle, A.I.G. went mainly to Washington. Even Lehman Brothers was split like a pie with the Southern District getting just one slice. According to George Packer of the New Yorker:

Given the targets in question – huge banks, well-insulated executives, intricately structured financial products, tens of millions of knotty documents – it’s unlikely that a federal prosecutor’s office, staffed by generalists and operating under standard procedure, which is to wait for cases to come in, could have made serious headway.

What the Department of Justice needed to do was organize itself as a knowledge-based organization rather than merely an investigating organization. Knowledge-based organizations put a premium on building up knowledge in core areas that they know will be critical to their success, and then develop systems to share that knowledge. (This field is sometimes called knowledge management.)