Leanda Lee
We have long been encouraged to multitask. Parallel activity was supposed to be more productive than activity in series. It certainly works for production lines, and most mums wouldn’t survive daily existence without being able to spread butter on little Tommy’s sandwiches, keeping an eye on the breakfast omelette and brewing coffee while warning tiny Tim that the dog wouldn’t be amenable to having his breakfast snatched and handing a bag of fruit to hubby with a kiss as he made his way out the door to work – all the time planning the next 5 telephone calls to school, the electrician, the piano tuner… and mentally checking off the shopping list for cousin Emily’s baby-shower which she promised to cater for at the end of the week. Somewhere in there she dresses and readies for work and starts her ‘productive’ day. Really, some of us have brains and bodies so busy that a Sunday afternoon’s shopping in Senado Square seems like solitude. It’s a pathology.
As I write this, I’ve switched to other tasks and activities: saved the file to that familiar folder 5 levels down the file explorer hierarchy, checked my emails on 3 email accounts and Facebook updates, subliminally been made aware of files updating in Dropbox from somewhere in the next hemisphere, made cups of tea, coffee, fed the dog, checked accommodation options for a friend visiting over Christmas and commenced and threw back into the too-hard basket a review of a student’s exam. And so, I’ve progressed a mere paragraph and a half as I now reach for another sip of wine. Procrastination or multitasking? Either a fine line or an excuse.
It wasn’t always like this. It used to be easy to concentrate. A favourite place of mine to read and write was on the top floor of a university library between the stacks of periodicals that hardly anyone perused, blinkered by the wings of a one-man desk in the furthest corner away from the stairs. This was before the days of connectivity and the popularity of coffee shops –
absolutely zero distractions other than self-musings. This is the stuff of creativity, volumes written, theory development and ideas that one might be lucky enough to capture as they flit in and, if not careful, just as swiftly flit out again like Tinker Bell’s tease. Creative productivity cannot be interrupted with an SMS, chat-messages, a sociable colleague smiling across a desk or over an office partition (if you’re lucky enough), or normative demands to respond to emails and phone calls in a ‘timely’ (read immediate) fashion.
We don’t produce more by doing more at once because the switch between tasks, that transition, takes time. Moreover, it takes time to get into the flow, the zone or the groove, that really produces the best work efficiently. When we are switching between activities we never get into that really productive space in our minds.
Nor do we give people the time of day that we should when we are constantly responding to the demands of others out of our reach. In Macau, too often have I been at a counter being served when a phone-call or another customer butting in was given preference. This lack of common courtesy seems such an affront but perhaps it’s just the habit of switching between tasks, and expectations of multitasking and its myth of productivity that lets service workers get away with it.
Multitasking used to be viewed as a virtue at work. Some women, in particular, would brag superiority based upon this (innate) ability often said to be lacking in men. But it’s time to rethink. There’s a great deal of research (Stanford University, University of Glasgow, University of Hartfordshire, among others) to suggest that multitasking may not be all it’s cracked up to be. It might feel good, but, man, multiple tasks are better enjoyed one task at a time. It’s time to put those blinkers back on: next stop, productive creativity.
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