I was watching IPL, as well as eating water melon, while chatting with my mom. Multitasking. We humans call this, with that word. But after reading an article in Reader’s Digest, I realized I never attempted multitasking till now. So Strange isn’t? Read on.
Before sharing my views on this, I like to thank Reader’s Digest, Mohan – Editor of Reader’s Digest and Pierre Jolicoeur, the Research Chairperson in Experimental Cognitive Science at the University of Montreal for throwing some light about the so-called “Multi-Tasking”. Here we go…
We all hear many magazines/articles/experts say that Women are good at Multi-tasking and many quote their Work-Life Balance as an example. Let’s see from a simple instance. A Woman prepares coffee, answers to the questions of her Husband, keeps an eye on her child roaming around the home and it goes on… Let us analyze this. Preparing Coffee – Needs visual, think, touch senses to be active. Listening sense is at rest. So it is possible to the questions. Now this is a multi-task. But if she tries to answer back, her concentration diverts from coffee (Visual sense remains, thinking diverts) to answer the questions. When she tries to monitor her child, thinking sense comes back to coffee, Visual diverts. Is one of the six senses, is not allocated to a particular job, we’re finished. I.e., either Coffee is not prepared well/Husband is cross/Child has got hurt.
So Multitasking can be precisely defined as Taking in two/three jobs at a time/at any instant and completing them successfully. Its utter waste to multi task if we cannot give the same result as we do them individually. We often listen our dear ones saying “ Are you there? “ during a call, that shows you have not responded well, possibly because you are trying task-switching. Task Switching is moving from a job to other, by putting the former on the hold, and hoping that we complete latter as fast as possible. But in most cases, we end up in a mess. Can we really answer a colleague on call, while typing an email to another, at the same instant? If you say yes, think again. You might type, when you listen on call. But you lose concentration and end up asking “can you come again?” You cannot type, when you talk and that’s for sure. Attempting to type will give you Zero Result. You end up with stress and low performance on a long run if you attempt to multi task.
If you deny the above message, and still say you are multi-tasking, I challenge you to this. This test is taken from Reader’s Digest.
Time yourself as you create two separate lists of the letters of the alphabet, and the numbers from one to 26. First, alternate between the two sets of characters as : A,1,B,2,C,3 …. And so on. Second, write out all the letters, then all the numbers. Most people, who complete this exercise, find that switching between the numbers and letters takes nearly twice as long – and their work is more likely to be riddled with errors- than when they focus on one set of characters at a time.
Crazy, isn’t it? I like to conclude with a quote from the article written by Allan Britnell for Reader’s Digest. “Our Overachieving world admires people who tackle many tasks at once. But researchers say that devoting attention to one thing at a time is more productive-and better for our health and safety.”
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