2005 John Phipps

The new efficiency booster: monotasking

Be the first in your area to reap the benefits of scorching-hot new business research! Be the operator who whets the cutting edge! Amaze friends and family with your 21st Century management prowess! Do one thing at a time. As for me, I am still reeling from the shock of this discovery. Could anybody have seen this coming? OK not counting my grandmother and woodworking friends, and few other old-fashioned plodders. Let me explain how it works. (Ill go slowly; you may be on the phone or watching TV). Lets say you are trying to write an article on, say, multitasking. This is creative work and utilizes (it may even exceed) the brains capacity for complex decision-making. Not only do you have to think up the words, you have to spell them (or get within hand-grenade range for your spell checker) and then animate your fingers (two, in my case Im saving the rest for spares) to operate the keys of your computer. Meanwhile the corn market opens. In a separate window, you keep eying prices and trying to decide whether to sell. This task involves powerful emotions (holding mucho 2004 inventory) as well as rational thought. The phone rings and the habit of answering throws you into a discussion of fixing the church elevator. You strain mentally to picture the location of the safety switch and remember the interlocks. Bottom line: a long morning, a so-so article, no corn sold, and even more elevator questions. Three complex mental tasks, each with decision rules, and each require memory access. Now add to that the decision process involved in whether to shift from one task and when. The result often is a productivity loss of 20 to 40% according to recent studies. The seconds needed to move from one job to the next add up to hours lost, scientists found. The habit of multi-tasking can also leave you vulnerable to avoidable mistakes. Picture-in-picture may have wiped out the dinosaurs for all we know. One key is the complexity of the task. Checking on when the truck will return to the field while combining related and straightforward mental processes likely can work out well. Conversely, discussing your daughters change of college residence while struggling through down corn likely will produce two bad outcomes: the more complex the tasks, the greater the losses, both in time and outcomes.

 2005 John Phipps

The problem is that it sure seems like Im getting more done. However this perception of getting two things done simultaneously has been largely untested by any comparison to monotasking until recently. Multitasking has already been identified as a contributor to the sensation of time deepening, where we feel like more time has passed than the clock shows. One reason most Americans consistently estimate they work more hours than they do is due to this phenomenon: it just feels like were working more. By comparison, full concentration on one challenging task can promote a state of flow, where psychologists say we do our best work. One aspect of flow is a sense of timelessness often marked by surprise at how late it is when we look up. Workers able to achieve flow operate at very high productivity as well. Given the complexity of todays decisions, I think I need to go with the flow more, and parallel-process less. The inefficiencies of multi-tasking may be hard-wired, especially for men. When hunting a mammoth you really, really need to stay focused. Women, who seem to multitask better, may have been shaped by their evolution as mothers a task that still defies neat scheduling. Multitasking also feeds our love of busyness. Lots of balls in the air mean we are pretty important, dont they? Surprisingly, the world may be just about ready to view monotasking as a sign of having arrived. Look that guy doesnt even have a Blackberry! How does that work? It doesnt take many hours at an airport watching cell-zombies walking glassyeyed between gates while conversing loudly with absent colleagues to notice the decline in public discourse. The few brain cells left available to control their physical actions dont make for amenable seatmates or pleasant waiting lines. And you can rule out meaningful conversation, of course. To be sure, using alternate tasks to act as concentration breaks can be refreshing. But for me at least, it is best in most cases to fully switch to each successive activity instead of adding one on the fly. Im not alone in making this discovery. The popularity of phone-answering trees is lifting the tyranny of the ringing phone to provide time to monotask. For that reason, I am more forgiving when shunted to voice mail than before. The most surprising reward of monotasking showed up later: I got some stuff done.