Multitasking is a myth

Have you ever gotten good at the wrong thing? I think it might have happened to me.

Yesterday, I read this article about the myth of multitasking — how what we once thought of as skillful juggling is nothing more than rapid switching from one task to another and then back again, over and over. But all that switching not only reduces the quality of work on each task, it also eats up extra time as the brain tries to refocus. Multitasking is less of a smart work strategy and more like a hyper puppy getting distracted by an army of passing squirrels.

I worry that motherhood made me such a prolific multitasker that I may have forgotten how to focus even when there aren’t tiny humans interrupting everything I do.

When the kids were little, rapidly switching from one task to another felt like part of the unwritten job description. There’s no such thing as telling a toddler who has climbed onto the back of the sofa and is about to swan dive onto a hardwood floor that he needs to wait until you finish loading the dishwasher. You just drop the dish, and you run. You avert disaster. And eventually, you get back to the dishwasher — if you’re lucky.

When our boys were 4 and 2 and their little sister was a newborn, I switched tasks so often that I felt completely defeated by nightfall. I’d try to remember what I’d accomplished that day but couldn’t name it, even though I’d worked more than 12 hours straight and never got a bathroom break that wasn’t interrupted by a kid who urgently needed a juice box. Switch, switch, switch — day after day.

At that point in my life, maybe the task-switching was largely unavoidable. It helped us stay alive. But the kids grew up and moved to college. Yet here I am, still bouncing from one thing to another like a ping-pong ball on steroids. The only person interrupting these longer stretches of available work time is me. And multitasking is my self-sabotage weapon of choice.

The truth is that, on any given day, I instinctively know what task on my list is most important — the one that would make me feel great if I either got it done or made significant progress on it. But that thing is almost always the hardest, most intimidating, or most uncomfortable item on the list. So, instead of doing that thing, I convince myself that it’s best to knock out a lot of smaller things, thereby “clearing the decks” for the big thing (which I promise I’ll do tomorrow).

But it doesn’t work. I end up switching around among a gaggle of less important things and go to bed knowing I used all that manic multitasking to avoid and delay the work that would count the most. It feels lousy.

So, in an effort to stop feeling lousy, I’m going back to basics. One chunk of time for one single task. No more swatting at a swarm of busywork fruit flies while an untouched vulture circles overhead, picking at the carcass of another wasted day.

I found a great quote from author Tim Ferris to help keep me honest. He said, “If you consistently feel the counterproductive need for volume and doing lots of stuff, put this on a Post-it note: Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.”

The Post-it note has been posted. I smacked it down right on top of the unwieldy to-do list. They say there’s strength in numbers, dear readers, so maybe we should do this together. Tomorrow is our fresh chance to do a big, uncomfortable, scary task — one brave step at a time.

Gwen Rockwood is a syndicated freelance columnist. Email her at gwenrockwood5@gmail.com. Her book is available on Amazon.