The Myth of the Multitask

“Multitasking is merely the opportunity to screw up more than one thing at a time.”
-Steve Uzzell

To do to two things at once is to do neither. Chase two rabbits and catch none. Pick your era and region of the world and you’ll have a proverb about the general concept that multitasking does not actually work.

We are raised on the idea that multitasking is the key to unlocking efficiency and time management in our lives. If you’ve gone on a job interview, chances are the suit across from you asked you to name a time where you successfully multitasked your way to project completion, or asked you to rate your ability to do two things at once. Hopefully your answer was, “Why would I elect to do two things averagely when I can do one phenomenally?”

I doubt it, though. Since I am guessing you wanted that job and you capitulated.

Has anyone ever proven that multitasking is successful? Has anyone ever actually challenged that notion? In The One Thing, Keller discusses Clifford Nass’ determination to do so and after examining 262 individuals in a formal study he concluded multitaskers were lousy at everything and “suckers for irrelevancy.”

Ouch.

It’s been proven that we can handle mindless talks, such as walking and looking at our phone for GPS, where our mental focus is entirely on our phone and the walking is subconscious and automatic. But what we cannot handle are two tasks that require our focus. Matt Richtel earned a Pulitzer Prize for his work on human distraction and in it, he revealed that simply talking on the phone has the exact same reduction of cognitive focus on the road as driving drunk (40%). Our cognitive load can only handle so much.

Buddhists refer to this as “monkey mind.” With 4,000 thoughts entering our minds daily, author Gary Keller of The One Thing makes the obvious connection that our minds are desperately trying to take us away from our primary goal. If something as mundane as driving can see productivity drop by 40% when another task is introduced, imagine what happens when we start introducing distraction and focus to your main work, goals, professional aspirations, fitness and health objectives and things that actually bear real consequence to our lives.

Focus up.

-Dave