It is very common these days to hear people talk about multi-tasking. Many believe multi-tasking helps them to be more efficient, get more things done and generally be available to everyone all the time. Ready access to information through Blackberrys, cell phones, text messaging and e-mails perpetuate the ability to multi-task.

But numerous studies have demonstrated that multitasking — at least in the way that most people hope it will work — doesn’t really exist. Sure, most people can walk and chew gum at the same time as the old saying goes, but if you used your mouth to walk it would be significantly more difficult. The point being, when you start to use the same or even similar cognitive skill sets during multi-tasking, it becomes literally impossible to do two things at once.

For example, talking on the phone and reading email is not possible because it requires very similar verbal processing skills in your brain. Talking on the phone while driving, an activity that has been studied intensively by scientists and highway safety experts, is possible, but even that tends to severely degrade one’s driving skills. And many states are imposing significant penalties for texting and driving, because not only is texting a distraction because it requires concentration to think and type, but it also typically requires people to look away from the road. So, forget it, texting and driving is impossible.

Instead of excelling at multi-tasking, people are actually best at “task switching”. We are good at applying focus for short periods of time on multiple things, but this attention is almost always sequential. One 2005 study found that many people were interrupted at work approximately every 11 minutes. After each interruption, it took about 25 minutes to circle back to the original item. Frequent task switching can seriously erode productivity because of the time required to switch from one task to the next.

At one company I worked at one of our developers had stopped listening to her headphones at work. Initially, I thought it was an effort to concentrate more on her work and less on the favorite songs that were playing in her ears. But as it turned out, she had stopped listening to her head phones, because she couldn’t listen to a single song from beginning to end without being interrupted by someone in the company asking her a question! Considering that the average song is only about 4 minutes long, this poor woman really only was able to complete her work before the rest of us got there or after we left.

Sarah Gilbert is a project management consultant and can be reached at
sarah.gilbert@what-if-project.com.

Filed under Project Management - General