Multitasking | NoisyCoworkers

Efficiency- is it what it’s cracked up to be?

I have always prided myself on being efficient. Give me 30 minutes where I’m not taking care of children (or my husband, for that matter), and I can conquer the world. I love the feeling of accomplishment and that sweet satisfaction it brings me as I fall asleep. In fact, one of the hardest things about moving to the UK was the lack of efficiency. I’m not trying to be the stereotypical arrogant American, but I will say that a country that rains more than Seattle, gets less sun than anywhere I’ve been, and is as far north as Moscow does not seem to be the ideal place to not have clothes dryers. I can handle not having dishwater- I can physically scrub, rinse, and dry them myself in less time than a dishwasher, so that’s NBD to me at all. However, I can not physically air dry my clothes. There is nothing I can do to speed up this process. Granted using the radiators does help, but that also costs us- we joke that we’re here for a PhD, not an MD.

I digress, as usual. My point is this- part of being efficient is multitasking. Why not make a phone call while washing dishes (that’s what the shoulder is there for, right?)? Or, why not prep dinner while the kids munch a snack and are relatively contained? Or why not watch a girly DVD while on the elliptical? I guess for me, I kind of got to the point where it was getting more challenging to draw hard and fast boundaries. I mean, I stay at home so I can rear our kids. That’s the point of me giving up the job I loved- it wasn’t a hard choice for me- I loved my kids more. For me, that was the best choice.

So, I find that the god of efficiency (and therefore multitasking) has robbed us of quality time and even thorough results. For example, that phone call while washing dishes was not as thoughtful as it could have been. The dishes weren’t as clean as they should have been. That time with the kids sitting, smiling, and enjoying life was missed while I cut some vegetables that could have waited. I am beginning to agree with this website:

Simply put, multitasking is trying to do too many things at once… Pressure in the modern workplace leads many of us to think that if we can do two things at once, we could save time, take on more and be more satisfied. What actually happens is that more mistakes are made, so we have to do tasks more than once, effectively lowering our achievement levels and creating frustration for those we work with and ourselves.

Now, I’m the first to admit that efficiency and multitasking can be very valuable resources, especially in the workforce. Obviously, I am at home with my kids, but while one goes to preschool, the other naps, and that is when I work- than and after they go to bed. I do love time with my husband, too, so getting as much done in as little time possible is essential for us. However, I am not willing to sign off on lower quality work. For me, I just need some time and a quiet place to think, free from distractions (don’t put me close to a sink, or I’ll try to get to work there, too). I’ve found that sometimes I just need to focus on one task at hand and do that one thing well.

“Distracted by distraction”

Is this website something you could have written (minus the reference to TS Eliot anyway)?

On Wednesday I received 72 e-mails, not counting junk, and only two text messages. It was a quiet day but, then again, I’m not including the telephone calls. I’m also not including the deafening and pointless announcements on a train journey to Wakefield – use a screen, jerks – the piercingly loud telephone conversations of unsocialised adults and the screaming of untamed brats. And, come to think of it, why not include the junk e-mails? They also interrupt. There were 38. Oh and I’d better throw in the 400-odd news alerts that I receive from all the websites I monitor via my iPhone.

I was – the irony! – trying to read a book called Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson. Crushed in my train, I had become the embodiment of T S Eliot’s great summary of the modern predicament: “Distracted from distraction by distraction”. This is, you might think, a pretty standard, vaguely comic vignette of modern life – man harassed by self-inflicted technology. And so it is. We’re all distracted, we’re all interrupted. How foolish we are! But, listen carefully, it’s killing me and it’s killing you.

You probably could have written the 1st paragraph, if not the second. How about the next two, though?

David Meyer is professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. In 1995 his son was killed by a distracted driver who ran a red light. Meyer’s speciality was attention: how we focus on one thing rather than another. Attention is the golden key to the mystery of human consciousness; it might one day tell us how we make the world in our heads. Attention comes naturally to us; attending to what matters is how we survive and define ourselves.

The opposite of attention is distraction, an unnatural condition and one that, as Meyer discovered in 1995, kills. Now he is convinced that chronic, long-term distraction is as dangerous as cigarette smoking. In particular, there is the great myth of multitasking. No human being, he says, can effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use language and the language channel in the brain can’t cope. Multitaskers fool themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output deteriorates.

The example cited above is pretty severe, but it does remind us how unproductive and potentially dangerous distraction is.

What distracts you? Is it as simple as noisy coworkers or as complicated as trying to accomplish too many things at one time? What can you do to limit your distractions and live life more fully? Really- think about it.

Efficiency- is it what it’s cracked up to be?

“Distracted by distraction”

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Efficiency- is it what it’s cracked up to be?

“Distracted by distraction”

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