Probably, everyone at workplace has experienced some amount of multi-tasking – juggling between an urgent email, a phone call from your boss, and trying to collate important documents for a meeting.
A good number of jobs and workplaces these days highlight the need for job seekers to be good at multitasking in a fast-paced work environment. Some of you may feel quite capable and competent with your multi-tasking abilities and probably you proudly highlight the same in your resume.
So how relevant is multi-tasking at workplaces?
Multitasking is the ability of an individual to perform more than one task at the same time. Also, it is often used to describe how busy managers or business executives can accomplish even more in the same amount of time. The term has often been linked with productivity and at times productivity gets equated with performance.
This is where we need to start thinking.
In 2009, Stanford University released a study concluding that we are far more productive when we focus on only one task at a time.
Switching back and forth between email and other streams of electronic information diminishes attention and recall. Also, recent research from Wharton finds that multitasking is not detrimental per se, but depends on the individual’s perception. According to researcher Shalena Srna, “although engaging in multiple activities is harmful to performance compared with engaging in a single task, the mere perception of multitasking is beneficial to performance.” Such as when asked to transcribe a certain video clip, some participants perceived transcribing as a single task. Also, those who perceived it as two simultaneous tasks (listening and typing) performed better by typing more words with better comprehension.
Studies even say that if we switch between tasks, our attention doesn’t immediately follow —a “residue” of our attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. One of the remedies for this dilemma is to switch over to single-tasking (working on a single, hard task for a long time without switching). This minimises the negative impact of attention residue from other obligations, allowing employees to maximise performance on one task.
But there’s a limitation to the activities done by a multitasker. A person is more productive when he is focused on a particular task. Newport calls these periods of prolonged, uninterrupted focus on one task “deep work.” So, one might be able to multitask well with items that don’t require much concentration (what he calls “shallow work”). Those duties are important, but they are not as impactful or innovative as the deep ones. When you have deep work to do, experts will agree that you should find a process that allows you to avoid interruption.
It’s important to understand multitasking, and your ability to process multiple stimuli, multiple streams of information in parallel. Ability to multi task helps in some scenarios at a fast paced workplace and work scenario but somewhere along the way there is a possibility of overall productivity getting compromised. Heavy & stretch multitasking does affect the task and tasker. It may be detrimental to jobs where deep thinking, critical thinking or focus is needed.
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