Is productive multitasking a myth?

Juggling, juggling, juggling. It can be a great party trick but more pertinently, it’s what we do on a daily basis. You hear the phrase constantly in our organisation and so many others too – juggling is everywhere! Those of you not based in our Central Office in London might be surprised to know that we actually have juggling classes run every lunch time … Okay not really, though I’d love to see it. But I have been thinking about juggling work and priorities a lot of late.

Someone asked me what kind of skills you need to work at Common Purpose. I think you need an ability to juggle priorities or keep the plates spinning, whichever metaphor you prefer. When recruiting new staff it was one of the key skills I looked for. Moving into an internal service providing role (from delivering our courses in London to supporting course delivery teams across the world as Curriculum Director) has highlighted this for me. We have to walk a fine balance between providing a swift and prompt service and working on long-term projects. I recently got married and had to juggle all the ‘wedmin’ with having a life which included non-related, wedding activities such as trying to get fit and work. Everything is a constant juggle.

I’m wondering what impact all this juggling has on our ability to concentrate and be at our best for everything we do. Is it an innate human condition? Or is it a symptom of the modern age? What say you?

Business coach Dave Crenshaw in his book, ‘The Myth of Multitasking’, argues that when we think we are being productive and multitasking, we aren’t. This is because on average we get interrupted every three minutes either by email, phones, texts, people, other thoughts etc. It then takes us a minute or two to get back to where we were, before a minute later getting interrupted again.

Crenshaw believes multitasking slows you down, because as you switch between tasks you spend your time retracing your steps rather than being productive. So in fact we just refresh our memory on each task and where we are with it before moving on, making multitasking a myth (or so the argument goes). Technology doesn’t help as we now have to deal with such a mountain of information and stimulus – our brains simply haven’t evolved to deal with this at the same rate at which technology has evolved!

I find this fascinating, although I don’t buy into it 100 per cent. We clearly do more than refresh our memory on tasks – we complete things, work on multiple projects and so on – but I also know when I’m bouncing from one thing to the next, that I am not at my most effective (as just proved by getting a text which stopped me – I read it, lost my train of thought and had to refocus!). So this leads me to ask – how effective are you at juggling, what conditions do you need to be effective at it, and when do you struggle with it?

This post was written by Andy Coxall, Curriculum Director, Common Purpose.

Jim O