After a recent Masterclass delivery, I received an email with the following question from a participant:
What are your thoughts on multitasking? I’m very much one to have many pots on the go at once. I find I can be really productive like this but perhaps there are some downsides that I’m not thinking of.
Preferences
What I replied back was that multitasking is such a personal matter. A question I ask my clients when exploring their preferences is ‘do they prefer working on one thing at a time or multitasking’?
Multitasking becomes an issue when it leaves someone feeling exhausted and scattered or maybe their work output or final delivery isn’t quite up to scratch. For that particular participant, they found that multitasking helped their productivity so why change what isn’t broken?
Personally, I can multitask only sometimes. It’s very dependent on what I am doing and where. As I explained to the participant, it’s about finding a balance between multitasking and single-focused time that’s right for you.
Layering...
There is a lot of negative talk about multitasking which I think comes down to the impact of Social Media and our attention spans. A way of seeing multitasking in a positive light is to see it as layering activities. This is when we say listen to a podcast we’ve been meaning to get to so as to make a boring task more fun or talking on the phone while doing dishes or something.
How about you, what do you prefer? Working on one thing at a time or multitasking? Hit reply and let me know!
2 Responses
I can ironically struggle with one thing at a time. I find diversity stimulates me.
Yes! Exactly. We’re all individuals and multitasking is stimulating for some 🙂 Keep doing you.