Those Ancient Greek giants with fifty heads and a hundred hands apiece must have been whizzo multitaskers. Computers are. You, if you're human, aren't. Almost certainly, however, you are expected to be, have claimed to be, or aspire to be, an ace multitasker. You may even believe, mistakenly, that you are one.
What? I hear you protest. I can simultaneously catch up on my podcasts, review reports, field phone calls, burn CDs illegally, watch Dave, send and read text, juggle jelly, feed the tapir and learn my children's names! Oh dear!
Please think. When you jam all that stuff into your poor overloaded brain, are you practicing effective time management - or merely looking "efficient"? In fact, according to time leverage expert, Tim Ferriss, you're simply 'doing more to feel productive, while actually accomplishing less'. The University of California moreover, finds that workers take on average 25 minutes to resume their original task after email or telephone interruptions. And the BBC reports University of London research showing that phone and email traffic hits a worker's IQ harder than smoking dope. Multitasking isn't effective time management, it's distraction masquerading as efficiency.
Can it get worse?
Yes. Researcher David Meyer (University of Michigan) links multitasking to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline, and so to loss of short-term memory and potential long-term illness. That's worse than just in effective time management! It means humans are just not wired for multitasking. (Don't panic, however: being able to count your feet while breathing doesn't mean you're a freak of nature, at least until you count more than two.)
Multitasking is now 'old century'. Although widely viewed as the effective time management norm in workplaces, it has been shown to reduce productivity as well as IQ. It seems efficient in the short-term but is seldom so in the longer term with its adverse effects on how people learn and retain information. We're experiencing, increasingly and globally, and largely because of crowding technologies, a phenomenon termed 'continuous partial attention', which leads to superficial understanding, to boredom and to impatience - not to efficient time management.
The new, 21st century way is single-tasking, in which effective time management and genuine focus is valued above busy-ness and time is used more profitably by stressing attentiveness and mindfulness. It's not really new, though:
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
- ALEXANDER POPE (1688-1744)
