MULTITASKING: Is It Good For Us?
Multitasking is merely the opportunity to screw up more than one thing at a time.
Gary W. Keller
Back in 1984, I was writing on the now defunct and rarely lamented BBC BASIC, one up from an electric typewriter, but hardly user-friendly. Nevertheless, it heralded entry into mass market computers, before we all hailed the tech giants of Microsoft and Apple.
Somewhere along this ever steepening path of clever and still cleverer computers, came the concept of ‘multitasking.’ Or how this amazing piece of technology can run several applications simultaneously without a bleep, a squeak or a murmur of despair. That’s multitasking. But that’s a computer. It was born to do this. We’re human beings. It appears we were not!
However, this isn’t me being a Luddite, wanting to destroy all computers and send technology back into the dark ages. This is a blog after all! But I’m now not sure I’m entirely a ‘butterfly brain’ as mentioned in a previous blog. Have I fallen prey to multitasking? Certainly my powers of concentration are not as acute as they were and I don’t attribute this simply to ‘old age.’ That’s too much of a cop-out for everything.
Increasingly, I’m realising that distraction is lethal. Even writing this blog I hear the ‘ping’ of my phone or the ‘ting’ of an email popping into the box. At one point, in the past, I even considered using a typewriter again – but the thought of re-typing everything was a serious retrograde step. But I have to make a conscious effort not to be distracted. Certainly, when I look for information on the web, as I’ve been doing for this blog post, I could easily go swanning off into Amazon and start looking for everything from vegetable seeds to Fitflops. Or wander onto a newspaper website and read why Melania Trump has been absent for 24 days.
I had to give myself a tap on the cheeks and start doing a little research to see if I could bring some clarity to my befuddled mind. Apparently what most of us think of as ‘multitasking’ – writing an email, listening to the radio whilst simultaneously noting the messages on our phone – is not actually multitasking at all. It’s serial tasking. Or sometimes it’s rapid task switching. And it’s a long way from that old adage, ‘Do one thing at a time.’
It would seem that aspects of multitasking are impossible for the human brain because, according to what I’ve read, we are not neurologically equipped for it. Nor, alas, am I scientifically equipped to explain this coherently! However, at the most basic level (mine!) different activities are processed in different areas of the brain, and whilst you could listen to classical music and write an email, it would be well-nigh impossible to write an email and listen to a lecture on neurosurgery and succeed in absorbing or retaining enough information to wield a scalpel! I’m being glib but in general it seems that multitasking is not a desirable attribute to acquire. One site I visited (apologies for not giving all the links) gave no less than eight negative reasons for not attempting to do it.
Summarising briefly, the two worst aspects are that we actually take longer to perform our tasks, and make more errors. Wow. Since multitasking is a form of interruption it would appear the key to greater efficiency is to be extremely focused and better organised! I intend to reform. And one of the best ways to deal with all this is to stay in present time! This is the mantra of every prophet and every wise human being who ever lived. Their advice is staggeringly consistent – do not linger in the past nor project forward into the future. Which of course leads back to that well worn maxim, ‘Do one task at a time and do it properly!’
In my view, Mr Keller, founder as it happens of the world’s largest real estate company, is right. Life is complicated enough, heaven knows, without giving ourselves even more opportunity to screw things up!