A habit that we humans seem to have
developed over the past 10 years or so concerns an obsession with what is
erroneously called multitasking. According
to folklore women can mutitask and men can’t and if you’re not multitasking
then you’re not productive. It seems that an essential life skill is being able
to text, tweet or share on Google +, while romancing the love of your life
across the dinner table. We seem more intent on recording an event rather than
actually living it. It may well be that this is what sees the end of our
species: we’ll just fail to reproduce.
The research on this phenomenon,
multitasking not love making, is not as supportive of our beliefs as we might
like to think. We don’t actually multitask. What we do is engage in several
tasks serially, spending perhaps only nanoseconds on one before switching to
the next, and then back again. This toing and froing, as you might guess, is
hard work on the brain and releases chemicals responsible for the fight and
flight response, and that creates what we all know as stress. Even a mild level of stress over a prolonged
period of time is bad for our health. The adrenaline released increases our
heart rate and blood pressure, puts stress on many of our other organs and
makes us tense, as if we were expecting something bad to happen. Sapping our
energy makes our brain less able to work at an optimum level causing us to make
mistakes and problem solve poorly. A substance called cortisol is released when
we experience stress and this suppresses our immune system and makes us more
susceptible to all manner of illnesses, including cancer. From a work and life
perspective attempting to multitask is not very productive.
One of the things that has come out of
brain research recently is that prolonged focus on one task is much less
stressful and is more likely to lead to greater productivity and quality in all
that we do. And I’m talking about not just quality at work but quality in our
relationships. I’ve spoken with many people over the years and have not met
many that, should they die prematurely, would miss work. Nearly everyone I meet
values their relationships above all else and family comes top of the list
pretty well all of the time.
This is difficult to reconcile with the way
we are treating ourselves with this fast-paced, highly distractible, instantly connected,
Facebook selfie-posting world in which we find ourselves. Driven as this
phenomenon is by narcissism and the inability to delay gratification, I get the
feeling that we are oblivious to the damage we are doing to ourselves and our
species.
From a leadership perspective, the question
is how we construct work to change this multitasking habit. It could have a
threefold effect. It would increase the quality and productivity in the
workplace in the first instance. Secondly, it would reduce stress in employees:
a worthy achievement in itself. And thirdly, perhaps it would contribute to
changing the more general tendency.
