I recently read a post by Vicki Flaugher of Smart Woman about multi-tasking that really struck a chord with me. For years us women have been showing off about our ability to multi-task when all along we’ve been getting it wrong! Multi-tasking isn’t doing lots of things at the same time, it’s doing lots of things very quickly one after the other, and that often means doing lots of things not very well. At least that’s what Vicki is saying in her post, and I’m inclined to agree with her.
Vicki refers to an article entitled The Myth of Multitasking by Christine Rosen, in the New Atlantis and provides some quotes from it. I have found some of my own from the same article:
Discussing his research on National Public Radio recently, Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles warned,
“We have to be aware that there is a cost to the way that our society is changing, that humans are not built to work this way. We’re really built to focus. And when we sort of force ourselves to multitask, we’re driving ourselves to perhaps be less efficient in the long run even though it sometimes feels like we’re being more efficient.”
Christine Rose goes on to say:
when we talk about multitasking, we are really talking about attention: the art of paying attention, the ability to shift our attention, and, more broadly, to exercise judgment about what objects are worthy of our attention. People who have achieved great things often credit for their success a finely honed skill for paying attention. When asked about his particular genius, Isaac Newton responded that if he had made any discoveries, it was “owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.”
So, what I take from this is something that I have been trying to do, with some success, for a little while and that is to have some interrupted time every morning to focus on just one project (or multi projects over a few hours) and then only getting involved with email, the phone and the other ’stuff’ from lunchtime onwards. Not a perfect solution but at least it’s a start!
What are other people doing to get the ‘big things’ done?
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