Let me paint you a picture of today’s typical multitasker and you tell me if this sounds familar. Mr. Multitasker is on a conference call for an important initiative, drafting an email, reviewing a deck for their next meeting, and reading an article on the web. Let’s face it most of us do this type of multitasking on a daily basis in the name of higher and higher levels of productivity. Heck, I bet most of you are multitasking while reading this post!
The big issue here is that we have convinced ourselves that multitasking is how you get more stuff done and prove you are top management material. But here are the facts, multitasking is not the golden brick road to high performance that many of us (myself included) believe it to be, it is actually the road to mediocrity. But try to tell that your typical espresso-driven, blackberry carrying, conference call hopping power executive and they will probably laugh in your face as they multitask their way to their next meeting.
Recently, the New York Times wrote a story about a Stanford University study that proves multitasking has it limitations:
Read it and gloat. Last week, researchers at Stanford Universitypublished a study showing that the most persistent multitaskers perform badly in a variety of tasks. They don’t focus as well as non-multitaskers. They’re more distractible. They’re weaker at shifting from one task to another and at organizing information. They are, as a matter of fact, worse at multitasking than people who don’t ordinarily multitask.
You know what this means. This means that the people around you — the husband who’s tapping the computer keys during an important phone conversation with you, the S.U.V. driver with the grande latte and the cellphone, the dinner companion with the roving eye and twitching thumbs — are not only irritating, they are (let’s not be fainthearted) incompetent.
But, wait. Should it be breaking news that a single person can’t juggle knives and explain quantum physics while polishing off an artichoke?
Breaking news and a shock to the researchers themselves, as it turns out. Originally, the team of researchers, whose findings are published in the Aug. 24 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were trying to find out what unusual cognitive gifts multitaskers possessed that made them so successful at multitasking.
They’re still looking.
“Multitaskers were just lousy at everything,” said Clifford I. Nass, a professor of communication at Stanford and one of the study’s investigators. “It was a complete and total shock to me.”
Initially suspecting that multitaskers possessed some rare and enviable qualities that helped them process simultaneous channels of information, Professor Nass had been “in awe of them,” he said, acknowledging that he himself is “dreadful” at multitasking. “I was sure they had some secret ability. But it turns out that high multitaskers are suckers for irrelevancy.”
The study tested 100 college students rated high or low multitaskers. Experimenters monitored the students’ focus, memory and distractibility with a series of electronic images of different-colored shapes, letters and numbers.
Eyal Ophir, the study’s lead investigator and a researcher at Stanford’s Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab, said: “We kept looking for multitaskers’ advantages in this study. But we kept finding only disadvantages. We thought multitaskers were very much in control of information. It turns out, they were just getting it all confused.”
The study’s results were so strong and unexpected that the researchers are planning a series of follow-up experiments. “It keeps me up late at night,” Professor Nass said. “I worry about both the short-term and long-term effects of multitasking. We’re going to be testing the heck out of high and low multitaskers.”
To the rest of the world, though, the people who trudge through life excited and unnerved by an occasional cellphone call while walking or watching the sun set (isn’t that multitasking?), the study’s findings aren’t quite so shocking. A constant state of stress, deluges of ever-changing information, the frenzied, nanosecond-fast hustle and bustle — this is bad for you? It’s surprising and it’s news that it’s bad for you? Before they lie down to take a well-deserved and uninterrupted nap, the trudgers of the world would like to say, “We told you so!”
Still, their sad sense of inferiority to the flash and dash of multitaskers lingers and may even interfere with a good sleep.
“The core of the problem,” Professor Nass said, is that the multitaskers “think they’re great at what they do; and they’ve convinced everybody else they’re good at it, too.”
Yes, they have. Take, for example, Robert Leleux, a New York writer and gentle soul who still struggles with a rotary phone.
“My entire life, I’ve been so thoroughly cowed by multitaskers,” said Mr. Leleux, author of “The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy.” “I find it impossible to believe they’re not superior to me. This study is like catnip! It validates my entire life.”
As a child, Mr. Leleux recalls, his unitasking took a culinary turn. When eating, he could concentrate only on one food at a time.
“Usually mashed potatoes first, and then maybe a vegetable,” he said. “It drove my mother crazy. She kept threatening to send me to etiquette school if I didn’t straighten out. I was scared to death till I turned 18 and realized going to etiquette school wouldn’t be such a bad thing.”
Today, Mr. Leleux finds himself in a mixed marriage with a fast-moving, multitasking husband whose professional life, Mr. Leleux said, resembles “His Girl Friday.”
“Michael can answer e-mails, talk on the phone, approve designs concepts and copy and artwork — all at the same time,” he said. “As a person who can only eat mashed potatoes at one time, it’s incredibly depressing there are people capable of working on 14 different things at a time.”
Even with scientific validation at his fingertips, Mr. Leleux frets that the Stanford study may have been done “by a bitter unitasker like me who wants to validate his own existence.”
“Look at the tortoise and the hare. Even though the tortoise actually ends up winning the race, who would you rather be? A wrinkly, fat old tortoise or a lithe, quick-witted hare? I think the answer is clear.”
So, if we are actually hurting our performance by multitasking than what are we to do? How do we answer all 140 emails we get a day, sit through 7 hours of meetings, launch that new initiative, and of course get our “day jobs” done? While I could say the simple answer is for you to go retro and “monotask” your way to greatness that probably isn’t going to fly in our 24/7 world.
In my opinion, there are only two ways to overcome our addiction to multitasking and no this does not involve a 12-step program, although that is not a bad idea. First, you must begin to practice the art of being in the moment. Does that mean you have to go cold turkey and can’t peak at your blackberry during a meeting? No, but it does mean that you have to focus and give your full attention to the people, activity or task at hand. Do this before moving on to the next task on your to do list and you will start to get more things done, not less.
Second, getting stuff done is not as important as getting important stuff done. To take your performance to the next level you have to get clear on your priorities and those activities that will actually make a difference to your company and career. How often do you sit down for even five or ten minutes and plan out what you must accomplish the upcoming week, month or even the year? Sucessful executives are laser focused on those initiatives, tasks, and people that will move them closer to accomplishing those critical priorities that will make them and their company look like rockstars.
So, the next time you find an executive or co-worker who claims that multitasking is the secret to their success, stop, and gently remind them that getting stuff done is not as important as getting important stuff done. There is a difference.