Multitasking works? Not really, Stanford study shows
it says more, perhaps, that i’ve been meaning to blog about this article for weeks than the article itself. the study confirms something that i’d begun to suspect – that when i’m multi-tasking, i’m not actually doing any of the tasks as well as when i’m focused on one task. my job demands that i jump around a lot – there is a constant stream of traffic in and out of my office door, phones that ring, reasons why i need to go to the shop and stage and rehearsal room – but i’ve noticed that i’m getting really bad about starting one task and then leaping to another and another, before i finish any of them.
i do think that multi-tasking is a pretty key skill for the nature of my job, but being good at it/flexible about its demands has been giving me permission to multitask even when it’s NOT necessary. i have two monitors on my desk*, and i starting using mac’s spaces function, thinking that it’d be handy to sort my applications into different screens: one for communication — to-do list, email and calendar and quick web research (that’s multiple tabs on multiple firefox windows), another for excel, another for word documents — what i’m realizing is that it’s giving me permission to have even more projects going at one time.
i’m also facing a larger workload than i’ve had in a long time, probaby ever, and feeling the pressure to be really efficient with the way that i work. i’ve been thinking about picking up a book on efficient working practices.** so tonight, on a get-lost-in-a-bookstore-date with B, i wandered over to the business section (steered clear of the self-help section) and looked at some books on time management. i picked up The 25 Best Time Management Tools & Techniques: How to Get More Done Without Driving Yourself Crazy, and this is the blurb on the back:
You get the benefit of the top twenty books on time management in one easy to read book. The authors took an interesting approach to writing this book. They started by reading the Amazon.com customer reviews for over 40 time management books. Then they bought and read the top 20 of these books. The key points from these books were then summarized as 25 clearly described tools and techniques and grouped into five areas of focus.
…and that just kind of horrified me. the quantity vs. quality notion. the approach that we can strip down tasks to make them as efficient as possible. that a book on time management was made by leap frogging off of other people’s books and reviews on time management and then repackaged. i’m…having trouble putting into words exactly what seemed wrong about this to me, but something’s definitely missing. i do need to find ways to do a large work load efficiently and in the lowest-stress manner possible. but i’m not sure i need a list of ways to color-code and organize my post-it notes. i need to think through the philosophy of putting my head and my values in the right place. this job is always going to be hard, always going to be too much work for too little time and pay. the question is whether i can get my head in the right place to work hard, be proud of what i’ve done, and let go of the things that i can’t do. i guess i should be browsing in the philosophy section instead.
PS. it took me almost two months, from the time i started it, to finish this post. and it started out being about multi-tasking, and ended up being about why i’m working in the arts and whether it makes me happy. QED.
* i’m not that fancy – it’s just that both are tiny and i need real estate for spreadsheets
**maybe i can read it while i watch a movie and check my twitter account.