Statistics show that people that take up more than one task at a time are unable to focus and perfect each task. Attention has to be divided among all of the projects at hand.
Being present is the only way to be aware of one's life experiences. The pace of life that multitasking has brought into the business world has infiltrated its way into personal lives, turning people into machines .
The mechanical industry has created a situation where, according to Madeline Bunting, author of Willing Slaves, “employees have been trained to do more than one job, so that if a machine breaks down or there is a delay in stocks arriving, they can do something else and then turn back to the original job.The aim of multitasking was to ensure a continuous work flow and no time is wasted waiting at the employee’s expense.”
Media Multitasking
The computer has led to a new crisis when it comes to multitasking, enabling an individual to do many tasks at once. The Nielsen Company’s Three Screen report shows that media consumption is on the increase through media multitasking.
From the laptop in the living room, people surf the internet, open emails, read the news headlines, and can catch the sports results, while working on a project and having a conversation on the telephone, all while watching TV and eating that missed meal.
Multitasking appears to save time, however, the more things that are done at once only seems to provides more time to do more multitasking. It makes the pace of life faster, and a hectic energy is generated though the multitasking. It actually “slows you down, increasing the chances of mistakes. Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information,” according to David Meyer of Michigan University.
Limitations of Multitasking
A core limitation in multitasking is an ability to concentrate on two things at once, and people have “a general hierarchy of focus. They will be concentrating on one task over the other,” according to Jonathan Sinton the business strategy director for Research International. And it often results in jumping from task to task without finishing any task perfectly, leaving room for error.
According to Rene Marois, “Numerous scientific projects have set out to prove that multitasking is a physical impossibility, and that people can only allocate partial attention to each activity.”
Prioritising Tasks
The answer to getting many things done is in managing tasks and projects instead of yielding to incessant things. Ms. Sunday of Brainpower Training claims there is no such thing as multitasking, and that efficiency in the workplace lays in prioritising tasks instead of jumping from one to the other.
Some tips that she uses in her training programs to better time management skills are:
- Write and track a to-do list;
- Stay focused on the next most important thing to do;
- Focus on high-value tasks ahead of low-value tasks, and;
- Balance the workload to create less stress.
Even though multitasking seems like it would save time, the chaos that ensues creates other problems. The old saying of "a job worth doing is worth doing well,"still holds merits in the technological age.
Source:
- Willing Slaves, Madeleine Bunting (2004).
- Journal of Experimental Psychology:Human Perception and Performance (August 2009)
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