Humans are generally not good at multitasking, despite what many will tell you. They very likely end up doing a bunch of tasks at less than their best. We are not machines and therefore don’t have the ability to slice up the time in ways that will be the most productive. Technology is good at doing this, but humans are not.
You may be able to get away with doing two items at the same time. But remember, any task which is not super simple will require full attention - and so therefore it is clearly not possible to do them simultaneously.
Even computers must emulate multitasking when the number of tasks required of them is greater than the number of processors. However, they do everything in a completely programmatic way. So, they know how to handle the emulated multitasking.
Another problem us mortals have with multitasking is that we can’t help our minds wandering off when doing the more mundane tasks. We forget what we were doing. We get distracted by the constant notifications and incoming comms that is the norm these days. Or we deliberately procrastinate (it’s human nature!).
Any interruption to our flow often requires us to retrace our steps to figure out where we got to. The science varies on this, but it is known that a distraction or interruption (whether external or self-created), can cost anywhere up to 12 minutes of ‘productive’ time on whatever your intended task was. That’s massive and a real time-stealer.
And of course, this becomes all the more complex, as businesses, managers and leaders expect you to get multiple tasks done, in a world where pace of change and action is ever more vital for success.
There are plenty of resources available out there, which could help you personally deal with this if you’re in this situation. You could try to find ways to delegate to others. You could implement a ‘Do Not Disturb’ focus approach to getting stuff done. Or you could try to breakdown your workload into much smaller and manageable work ‘packets’, meaning interruptions or side-tracking are naturally less likely to impact.
Set yourself a 2-hour task without any other structure and likelihood is, that task will take you much longer than that, due to those pesky emails that come in or your own wandering mind.
Break that task down into 5 or 6 chunks and approach it piece-by-piece, little by little - and not only do you mitigate the risk of getting side-tracked but you also build up natural momentum behind the entire series of tasks - which will definitely help to avoid some of the internal interruption challenges we see.
This is the ‘compound’ effect of splicing down objectives and tackling with real focus one piece at a time.
I believe you can take this principle and apply it to larger, wider business changes. Even in big transformation programmes, in fact. Really focus on breaking down objectives, not just into tasks, but into manageable chunks of activity which really help a project team hone in on constantly ‘achieving’. It not only builds that momentum we spoke of earlier, however if you get the layering of the actions and tasks right, you can often be delivering business benefits much quicker than through a traditional approach.
Of course, there are some challenges when doing this as you will need to manage resources somewhat differently - and it won’t come naturally to some – but if you make this work, it can be a tremendous productivity & bottom-line booster.
If you want help with applying this sort of methodology to a change or project within your business, we’d be happy to discuss how we can help.