I’ve made a commitment this year that has served me well so far in my professional and personal life. I have given up the myth of “multitasking.”
I’ve made a commitment this year that has served me well so far in my professional and personal life. I have given up the myth of “multitasking.”
We’ve learned to celebrate a complete lack of attention to the task at hand by giving it a productive sounding name. Kind of like when I used to say that “taking complete ownership” of a project was a key strength when what it really meant was that I was terrible at delegating. (I know that’s a weakness, but hey, admitting you have a problem is the first step towards tasking someone else with finding a solution.)
But I am not working on being a better multitasker, which, incidentally, my spellcheck just informed me isn’t a real word. (I knew it!)
I suppose I realized it in others’ behavior first, repeating myself several times to someone who was multitasking their way through a conversation with me. Meaning they were pretending to focus on one thing and doing another.
There is no skill or benefit in doing several things with partial focus versus giving full attention to one thing at a time. I don’t believe multitasking actually saves time. That “saved” time is going to get used re-doing at least one of the things you were doing, or asking additional questions after the fact because you didn’t get all the information the first time, or explaining to someone what you meant in that email that made no grammatical sense whatsoever. As in…
“Sorry, I was multitasking. I’ll resend with verbs this time.”
My best skill? Unitasking. (Yep, also not a real word, got it.) I promise to bring a complete lack of distraction and zero pulled-focus to every conversation, correspondence, and collaboration I have.
Maybe you’ll read this and call me lazy, or unproductive, or a slow worker. And if you do, I’ll stop whatever I’m doing so I can hear every word you say. That’s just the Unitasker’s way.