“Multitasking is the opportunity to screw up more than one thing at a time.” ~ Anonymous
There is no doubt in my mind that multitasking, that seemingly harmless ability to juggle multiple distractions and projects at once, is secretly waging war against your life and holds the potential to ruin your career in the process.
Think I’m being harsh? Keep reading and then decide what’s really at stake for you.
In a world that increasingly values depth and expertise, multitasking is keeping too many people from building up the levels of focus and concentration needed to make the breakthroughs that society and their careers require. Given how important our work is to our livelihoods and happiness, this is a crucial issue.
It’s not just that multitasking is a significant drag on productivity (up to a 40% productivity hit for someone juggling multiple complex problems). It’s that the world, and many of the products and services we love, are being designed to keep us from turning our attention to the things that matter.
This post is intended to lay out what’s at stake when it comes to multitasking, why you should care, and what to do about it.
But first, let’s look at an outlier.
The Curious Case of Elon Musk
Elon Musk is transforming not one or two, but three industries (soon to be a fourth?) with his massive bets and vision for space travel, electric vehicles, and solar power (and now AI?).
Reading the detailed account of his life thus far, authored by Ashlee Vance, one gets the sense that Musk is a master multi-tasker, able to simultaneously work on dozens of hard technical, business, people and family oriented problems (he’s been divorced three times and have five kids) all at once.
While Elon might seem like a multitasking machine on the surface, the majority of humans should understand that what he is doing now, as a CEO of several companies, is surely not what he did to get to this point. The book details how he would devour books and ponder intensely over complex problems from a young age. He seems to have a mastery over avionics, physics, software engineering and many other fields that would only come from an ability to dig in an learn concepts and then apply them over an extended period of time.
Further, the demands of CEO are unique from the requirements of most of us doing knowledge-oriented work. A CEO is unique in that their most optimal use is as a “decider,” being able to shift intense focus from one problem to another while supporting their staff in taking decisive action, and being an arbiter as needed. There is a reason “manage by wandering around” is a term thrown around in corporations. That means being visible and reachable. It’s part of the job.
However, even in this case, the need to dwell on a particular problem for an extended time (e.g. to set the Vision for a company or handle a restructuring) is also required for a CEO. From the book, it seems that Musk does engage in activity devoted to what Cal Newport would call “deep work” that is not interrupt-driven or requiring an immediate decision. Musk just does it when most of us are sleeping or watching Netflix (my assumption, I have no proof).
My guess is that while Elon Musk might be multitasking a lot during his work days, he’s surely spending a ton of time diving deep into specific problems late at night and on the weekends. I’d love to know the answer to that assumption. For now, based on reading Vance’s book and various articles about Musk, I’m assuming I’m right!
Focus Is Your Most Valuable Skill
Where does your extraordinary ability to concentrate for extended periods of time come from? How do you build up the capacity to make quick and correct decisions in times of stress? Why are some people able to create lasting works of art or otherwise make their little dent in the universe — while the rest of left hoping for more?
My belief is that all of these capacities come first from training and improving your ability to focus. Multitasking, as the majority of us, do it — hopping from email to Facebook to PowerPoint to the kitchen for a drink and back to PowerPoint — is the antithesis of focus.
I believe that prolonged multitasking and drowning in a sea of information and projects, and the distraction it creates, is not only driving you crazy and shooting up your stress levels, it is also ruining your career and compromising your happiness.
This rest of this post will explain why you should care about this, share some practical strategies for helping you cope with distraction, and I hope, inspire you to build up your capacity to focus.
Like any learned skill, your ability to single-task and focus can be trained.
What It Takes To Do Great Work
I spent many years working at my last company, Microsoft, including many years as part of the Microsoft Office division. As part of my role, we spent countless hours studying and understanding how people do their work and the role technology could play in helping them create more, do more and be better in their jobs.
As part of my job, we dove deep into the growing role of “Knowledge Workers” a phrased coined by Peter Drucker over 50 years ago and broadly applied to the set of workers that are using information and knowledge to create products and services. This type work contrasts with the industrial age of employees performing a repetitive task as part of a machine.
Knowledge work is creative and goes beyond the basic.
“The most valuable asset of a 21st-century institution, whether business or non-business, will be its knowledge workers and their productivity.” ~ Peter Drucker
In a knowledge worker economy, which is what we are in right now, it’s no longer sufficient to be excellent at routine or basic tasks. Those are the type of things (e.g. data entry, basic analysis, etc.) that are easily automated through software or process improvement.
As technology advances and software eats the world, the way knowledge workers, and the businesses they work for, stay relevant is through the creation of more interesting, useful and innovative products and services. The “water line” for being relevant and remarkable in a knowledge-economy is always rising. This can be both exciting (as new opportunities arise) and frightening (if you aren’t building new skills and depth as your job becomes redundant).
Staying relevant as a knowledge worker takes the depths of knowledge, insight, creativity, and effort. Dare I say, it also takes time and the ability to focus and concentrate.
If your hourly routine involves multitasking across three completely different projects; checking five social networks, two email accounts, and three messaging services; your capacity to concentrate and create remarkable work will be next to impossible (in my opinion and direct experience!).
Don’t look to people like Elon Musk (or Jack Dorsey, who is the CEO of both Twitter and Square) and use your assumptions of how they work as an excuse to multi-task and juggle projects. How they work is unique to them. Furthermore, it’s also likely that what you don’t notice is the countless hours of dedicated practice, concentration, and focus that got them to where they are at.
Besides, Elon and Jack are probably still spending more time doing focused knowledge work that most of us in spite of their other demands! At least, I hope they are. If they aren’t, their companies will suffer down the road.
We Are Built For Single-Tasking
Most trained knowledge workers can only do one thing at a time, at a high level. The interesting result of laboratory studies is that even college students, who by their age and experience in technology use should be among the most efficient multitaskers, are often unable to perform two complex tasks concurrently while maintaining reasonable accuracy.
For example, try writing a detailed essay while paying attention to a podcast with the goal to listen and learn from it. Notice what happens in your mind. How long does it take to complete the essay? What is the quality of your work? How many errors are you making? How much effort are you putting in? What is your stress level? Are you experiencing any degree of flow?
Even if your mind is capable of thinking of multiple ideas in a similar time-frame, we are only able to devote our full mental energy to one creative thing at a time. I say “creative” explicitly, because we are able to walk and chew gum simultaneously. However, these tasks are not the sort of things that will get you ahead in the knowledge economy.
You might say that it’s ludicrous to think that multitasking is doing two or more things simultaneous. “Who the hell does that?!!” you might say. “I just switch tasks periodically, that’s totally different!”.
Unfortunately, whether you work on projects simultaneously or repeatedly change between then, you will still suffer from what, in a 2009 research paper, University of Minnesota business professor Sophie Leroy calls “attention residue.” Leroy explains that every time a brain shifts its attention from one task to another, part of its energy is still processing the first task.
To be relevant, you need to go beyond the expected. This takes effort, concentration and creativity. You are built for single-tasking and can only do one piece of detailed creative work at once. You might choose to hop around across various projects over a certain span of time (an hour, a day, a week, etc.). However, if you are switching among different projects too often, or worse, trying to think simultaneously about multiple projects at once, you will be massively hurting your productivity.
Let’s look at this in more depth next....
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