This Multitasking Bad? Another View....

Dave, a Management Craft reader, sent me an email with his thoughts about multitasking. Because I love to share many points of view, I asked Dave if I could post his email and he said, "yes." Here it is. Thanks Dave!

Lisa,
I listened to your podcast this week with David Crenshaw about multitasking.  I was very intrigued by the comments made by both you and David.  I would agree that “scattered” multitasking is a time killer.  When jumping from one task to another it does take time to re focus your energy and your brain.  I do however disagree with the comments that you can not train to be a better multitasker and that multitasking is an old and outdated way to both manage your people/department/company and your projects.

First, we need to define or clarify multitasking.  I believe that there are Tasks of varying sizes and complexity that can be broken down into smaller sub sets or smaller tasks.   The example I will use is cooking a dinner. The large or main task is cooking the dinner, the sub sets are: BBQ the roast, bake the potatoes cook corn and make a soup.  If the roast takes 2hours to cook, the potatoes take 1 hr, the corn takes 20 minutes and the soup takes 1 hr, without multitasking the meal would take up to 41/2 hours to prepare and cook.  This can be reduced by over 50% by properly planning out the cook’s time.  While the roast is on the BBQ prepare the soup, while the roast and the soup are cooking prepare the potatoes, while the roast is on the, soup is cooking, the potatoes are cooking prepare the corn.  If everything has been planned and executed properly the roast, soup, potatoes and corn are all ready within a few minutes of each other.  The cook has successfully completed a series of tasks simultaneously, or in other words multitasked.  The time savings are significant and the project (Dinner) was a success.  The key to this being successful is paying attention and planning thinks out.  While the roast may take 2 hrs to prepare and cook it does not require constant attention.  Same for the soup, potatoes and corn.  Each task requires monitoring, which the cook can do while he is completing the other tasks.

Second, I do believe you can become better multitasker.  With training and experience you can learn from your mistakes and make your process better. In the above example if you over cook the roast because you were preoccupied with the soup, next time you will pay more attention to the BBQ to prevent the flare ups.  As business people we are always learning and improving.  If something does not work, we assess, rework if necessary and attempt again. 

The main reason for this email is to say that multitasking has its place, and can be very effective in both personal and professional life.  This happens when people are trained and managed properly on what multitasking is how it can be good and the pitfalls that can happen if it is not executed properly.

Dave

Comments

[Mike King]

I'm glad to see this quick response as well. I really couldn't agree at all with the idea that its useless to teach multitasking from this original topic and video. There is wasted time in everything we do and taking advantage of that by efficiently task switching or multitasking is an enormous productivity boost. And its easy to teach and make the most of it as long as people don't take it too far where there are continual distractions adding more waste.

[barfield]

Multi tasking is a computer feature that enables small jobs to be executed almost in paralel. It only works when one job has to wait a while before it can continue (eg. the roast on the bbq=reading a slow network connection)

However when you are doing a single computation multi tasking on a computer only adds overhead (what was i doing, what are the numbers what is the next job etc.)

Humans work pretty much the same as computers. We can only do one job well, but with some timing and planning we can control a lot of actions.

Multitasking takes a lot of effort and energy to do well. You should plan your actions and keep track of what you're doing.

Other then humans computers can be made faster by adding more CPU cores (cloning yourself to do half your jobs is about the same)

On the computer science area a lot of work is being done to delegate complex tasks into little units that can be done together even when they originally actions are one action at a time.

Don´t do this as a human, dont try to execute work in paralel that really takes needs your complete focus.

[Ben]

The example given by Dave in his email, which is quite a good example, is a form of multitasking that I call simultaneous/parallel tasking. Each of the four sub tasks he describes need to be completed at the same time, but each has a different start time. Effective planning ensures the sub tasks are completed.

Housework is another good example of simultaneous/parallel tasking. I can complete four loads of washing, vacumming, dishwashing, sweeping and mopping the kitchen floor, cleaning the toilet and bathroom and other irrugular tasks in three hours of concentrated effort. This is due to my experience, two and a half decades worth, in knowing when to start each task and to complete the "monitoring" and "completion" aspects.

The key to task completion is to know what tasks need to be mono-tasks requiring full concentration and what tasks need to be simultaneous/parallel with concentration switched as needed.

[Dave Crenshaw]

This is a common issue I discuss at length in my book and in my keynote speeches.

I make a distinction between SWITCHTASKING(attempting to perform multiple tasks at the same time that require effort and attention) and BACKGROUND TASKING (performing a task while something mindless and mundane occurs in the background). While Background Tasking can be effective and efficient, switchtasking never is.

Please check out this very current story in NPR:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95256794

Also visit by book page on Amazon:

http://www.tinyurl.com/multitasking007

All the best,
Dave Crenshaw

[will armstrong]

the key in effective multi-tasking is to plan, just as Dave said in his dinner analogy. plan limits, constraints, slots for concentrating more on specific tasks or people, and schedule interruptions.

one of the things that sucks up the most productivity and time in our organization is poorly managing information and communications - allowing oneself to get sucked into the web for hours researching or reading and replying to e-mails all day long instead of scheduling periods to do this.

communication is one "task", if it is to be meaningful, that requires focus ("single-tasking") so times need to be slated for this where other things will be put down.

doing a lot is not necessarily effective or productive if it is not moving directly towards accomplishing your criteria and goals for the given period. it is also not beneficial if the necessary quality is not being produced because of lack of focus to detail, which is a huge weakness of multi-taskers.

[Poligar]

Systematic training in multitasking is possible and is being done in India since Vedic times. You may read about it in this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avadhanam

[Poligar]

Systematic training in multitasking is possible and is being done in India since Vedic times. You may read about it in this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avadhanam