8/13/2019 Mo Not Asking

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2005 John Phipps

The new efficiency booster: monotasking

Be the first in your area to reap the benefits of scorching-hot new businessresearch! Be the operator who whets the cutting edge! Amaze friends and familywith your 21 st Century management prowess!

Do one thing at a time.

As for me, I am still reeling from the shock of this discovery. Could anybody haveseen 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 watchingTV). Lets say you are trying to write an article on, say, multitasking. This iscreative work and utilizes (it may even exceed) the brains capacity for complexdecision-making. Not only do you have to think up the words, you have to spellthem (or get within hand-grenade range for your spell checker) and then animateyour fingers (two, in my case Im saving the rest for spares) to operate the keysof your computer.

Meanwhile the corn market opens. In a separate window, you keep eying pricesand trying to decide whether to sell. This task involves powerful emotions (holdingmucho 2004 inventory) as well as rational thought.

The phone rings and the habit of answering throws you into a discussion of fixingthe church elevator. You strain mentally to picture the location of the safety switchand remember the interlocks.

Bottom line: a long morning, a so-so article, no corn sold, and even more elevatorquestions.

Three complex mental tasks, each with decision rules, and each require memoryaccess. Now add to that the decision process involved in whether to shift from onetask and when. The result often is a productivity loss of 20 to 40% according torecent studies. The seconds needed to move from one job to the next add up tohours lost, scientists found. The habit of multi-tasking can also leave youvulnerable to avoidable mistakes. Picture-in-picture may have wiped out thedinosaurs for all we know.

One key is the complexity of the task. Checking on when the truck will return tothe field while combining related and straightforward mental processes likelycan work out well. Conversely, discussing your daughters change of collegeresidence while struggling through down corn likely will produce two badoutcomes: the more complex the tasks, the greater the losses, both in time andoutcomes.

8/13/2019 Mo Not Asking

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2005 John Phipps

The problem is that it sure seems like Im getting more done. However thisperception of getting two things done simultaneously has been largely untested byany comparison to monotasking until recently.

Multitasking has already been identified as a contributor to the sensation of timedeepening, where we feel like more time has passed than the clock shows. Onereason most Americans consistently estimate they work more hours than they dois due to this phenomenon: it just feels like were working more.

By comparison, full concentration on one challenging task can promote a state offlow, where psychologists say we do our best work. One aspect of flow is a senseof 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 thecomplexity of todays decisions, I think I need to go with the flow more, andparallel-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 tomultitask better, may have been shaped by their evolution as mothers a taskthat still defies neat scheduling.

Multitasking also feeds our love of busyness. Lots of balls in the air mean we arepretty important, dont they? Surprisingly, the world may be just about ready toview monotasking as a sign of having arrived. Look that guy doesnt even have aBlackberry! How does that work?

It doesnt take many hours at an airport watching cell-zombies walking glassy-eyed between gates while conversing loudly with absent colleagues to notice thedecline in public discourse. The few brain cells left available to control theirphysical 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 berefreshing. But for me at least, it is best in most cases to fully switch to eachsuccessive activity instead of adding one on the fly.

Im not alone in making this discovery. The popularity of phone-answering trees islifting the tyranny of the ringing phone to provide time to monotask. For thatreason, I am more forgiving when shunted to voice mail than before.

The most surprising reward of monotasking showed up later: I got some stuffdone.