It seems like my mantra for life has been quite close to that of David H. Freedman. After all, he inspired me to focus two articles on his ideas of how mess can be a good thing, both at work and at home. Now, once again, he’s given me reason to hope that my multi-tasking skills aren’t doing me as much harm as the so-called experts would like me to believe.
When multi-tasking first became a common vocabulary word, it was seen as a good thing. If one person can do several things at once, more gets done, right? Not long after that, studies began to show that the multi-tasking method of working wasn’t quite as great as previously thought. In fact, it was worse. By changing your attention from one thing to another, you lose valuable time, making projects last longer than they normally would have.
In fact, for those of you who may have been paying attention, I actually advised not to multi-task in a previous article of mine. My own nature to multi-task had been severely stifled up to that point. Like many others, I believed that if I could stick to one project to the end, my workload would be less stressful. This is not hypocrisy on my part. This is learning. And while I still feel that multi-tasking isn’t called for in certain jobs, I do feel that Freedman makes a strong case for it in his “What’s Next” blurb in this month’s issue of Inc. (Freedman, David. H. “Why interruption, distraction, and multitasking are not such awful things after all.” Inc. Feb. 2007: 67-68).
While experts suggest that multi-tasking loses companies an average of 2.1 hours per day in employee productivity and lowers our IQs by ten points, Freedman feels differently. As one of the minds behind the “mess is okay” school of thought, he finds that multi-tasking is actually important in today’s fast moving business world. He still believes that it does indeed impair a worker’s ability to get things done in a shorter period of time. But he also makes a good point when he discusses that technology has changed the priorities of the work world. It’s not as important anymore for one thing to get done in a short period of time. Priority is to “address whatever fraction of a vast, malleable range of tasks has become most critical.” In other words, what part of which project needs to be done NOW.
Work does not follow a linear pattern anymore. In the old days, an employee could take one project, work it from start to finish, and then move on to the next one. Now we have faxes. We have emails. We have conference calls and voicemail, and suddenly, twenty different clients can contact us about twenty different projects, all in the matter of twenty seconds. When I started my current job, I figured it would be like ones I had in the past. Start with something, finish it, move on. Admittedly, I was naïve. It didn’t take long before I realized that you can start something with every intention of finishing it in the same sitting, but the chances are strong that customer complaints, co-worker requests, and the smell of fresh coffee are all going to distract you at some point.
Freedman seems to have a grasp on this, and I find it hard to disagree with his point of view. There may still be project oriented jobs out there. Mine isn’t one of them, and I would guess that they are steadily becoming few and far between. In the same way he pointed out that messiness has its advantages, he does the same with multi-tasking. Finishing a project is good. But if you’re putting off clients and ignoring higher priority tasks until you finish your current work, there will be some negative repercussions.
The stress brought on by multi-tasking is likely to equal the stress of dealing with such repercussions. Perhaps instead of focusing on the bad side of this way of working, employees need to work on becoming better at it. For all the expert advice, it doesn’t seem like multi-tasking as a work habit is going to lose ground any time soon. As a matter of adaptation, should the work world embrace multi-tasking as the better way businesses should be run?
I am more than willing to retract my earlier thoughts and say yes. Faxes, emails, and phone calls are not going to stop anytime soon. Why not adapt our multi-tasking capabilities to work the same way? If you’re lucky enough to have a job where you can proceed from start to finish, make that work for you. Go with it. For everyone else, it’s time to stop worrying about how multi-tasking may be making us “dumber” and worry about how we can do it in a way that keeps business rolling and our customers happy.
Freedman ends his article with a good point. Many tennis players train with two balls to “improve reactions, to learn to cover more ground with less effort, and to develop a faster-paced game.” For those in the business world, that idea holds just as true.
