If It's Not One Thing, It's Another
Similarly, shuttling among two or three different pieces of work can be accomplished efficiently provided each one is relatively simple and they are adequately differentiated from one another. Where trouble arises, says Greenberg, is with problem-solving types of tasks, the kind that require creativity, integration of thoughts, and the generation of new ideas. Switching among such tasks demands a certain degree of downtime. The fuel cell of imagination can only be drained for so long before it needs to be recharged. Attempting to solve a problem with a dead imagination is a recipe for failure, not to mention a large waste of time.
Darrel Raynor, a managing director with Data Analysis & Results, has been aware of multitasking's damaging effects on productivity for a number of years. Raynor, who works with companies to create project management offices as a way of boosting IT productivity, says a database analyst asked to switch among four projects will likely be 45 per cent less productive than if she's allowed to finish one before starting the next.
"Someone can spend two to three hours a day [of downtime] acclimating to different projects just to gain the focus needed to be productive," Raynor says. If Raynor's assessment is accurate, it's easy to a put a number to that kind of brain drain. Say our overtaxed, multitasking analyst makes $75 an hour and works 1500 hours a year. That means the two to three hours a day she spends recharging her imagination in order to multitask cost her company about $50,000 annually. That's money being spent just getting up to speed to do actual, productive work.
Multitasking and Me
I felt relieved when I first read about multitasking's insidious tax on productivity. My idea of productive multitasking is listening to music while huffing on a treadmill. I've never been comfortable juggling plural assignments, preferring instead to follow a linear approach. I like to focus on one project, work on it uninterrupted from beginning to end, and then - and only then - move on to the next thing. Unfortunately, I've rarely been afforded the luxury to work in this fashion either way back when at school or today in my current job. Deadlines overlap, meetings intervene and colleagues have needs that never seem to coincide with the downtime in my schedule. (The one exception in my life that I faithfully pursue in a linear manner is garden work: first the trimmer, then the mower, then the weeding by hand.) The world of work just doesn't fit into neat and tidy compartments for most of us, even when we aren't under the gun to take up the slack caused by understaffing. At least now I know I'm not lacking a multitasking gene. Following a day of task-juggling, my attention span rivals that of a toddler's - and that, I'm happy to learn, is completely normal.
Unfortunately, even in the face of the mounting scientific and anecdotal evidence (not to mention individual blood pressure and stress levels) that multitasking doesn't work, companies cling to it like shipwrecked survivors to flotsam. They believe that asking employees to multitask saves them money and time when chances are good that it will do neither. This unintelligent intransigence is all the more troubling because most of us intuitively recognise the problems multitasking can pose. We cringe at the thought of someone operating a lathe while scanning the crawl on CNN or a teenager talking on a cell phone while driving. True, none of us are going to lose a digit or rear-end a mini-van because we're typing, listening to voice mail and reading instant messages simultaneously. But as Greenberg says, when one's attention is divided, something's got to give. Companies that see multitasking as part of the solution to their staffing issues are actually making their problems worse and are not, finally, doing more with less. They are doing less with less.
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