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.
People don’t actually do very well when they have to do two or three tasks at once. Instead what we think of as multitasking is just shifting your attention from item to item. I have worked with one man who – thanks to a quirk of his ADHD – does this really well. But for the rest of us (me included) true multi-tasking is an uninspired idea. There’s plenty of research out there that suggests that doing more than one thing at once leads to mediocre results: it’s harder to learn new things and it’s harder to do things you already know how to do. True multitasking rewires our brains so that we’re actually more suscebptable to being distracted by irrelevant information long after the multitasking is over.
And as to those job descriptions looking for multitaskers; what they really seem to be looking for are people who can balance priorities and handle a variety of types of tasks. It’s a lot less intimidating when I think of it that way.
Some thoughts:
- Doing one thing at a time is OK – it’s the way most people work best
- It’s critical for me to structure my day so that I can do important tasks on their own
- My biggest distractions are things like email, texting, phone calls, and the like; I need to box out specific times for them, and then not let them out of their boxes.
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