I talk with people regularly about the pitfalls of multitasking. The majority of the time I receive enthusiastic agreement about the productivity downsides of trying to juggle multiple things at the same time.
And yet take even a casual look around our workplaces and roadways…. What do you see? I see plenty of evidence that our actions don’t align with what we say we know.
Talking on the phone while trying to look up some information–while driving. Trying to draft an e-mail while having a conversation with someone. Checking messages on a Blackberry while sitting in a training session.
Earlier this year I interviewed Dave Crenshaw, author of The Myth of Multitasking, for my People and Projects Podcast. Dave talked about how we actually switchtask rather than multitask, adding stress and wasted time rather than efficiency when juggling multiple creative tasks.
A new study recently released from Stanford confirms Dave’s point. According to Professor Clifford Nass, high multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy”, easily distracted by the noise that bombards us all every day.
Want to get more done today? Work on focusing on one thing and get it done.
And here’s an idea! Check out the video below (but don’t check e-mail while doing so)!
Confirms again what we "old school" folks have known for years.
The whole "scanning the environment" and "being flooded with information" part interested me. I wonder if the study found a difference between men and women as it relates to how they attempt to multitask. I wonder if it might go all the way back to the evolutionary root differences between men and women – the Hunter/Gather thing,
Hunters were definitley single taskers – very focused on one task only. Gathers had to always "scan" their environment and be more open (read: flood) to more information coming in from different senses at the same time and process all of that.
I wonder if technology is creating a "gatherer" generation.
Just a thought.