Circus Act: the Art of Multitasking!

Circus Act: the Art of Multitasking! 

Some years ago, when I quit my regular job to freelance, and be an at-home mom, I realized that completing all the chores and tasks on my daily list was taking a long time. It was looking for ways to maximise my productivity in the time available that I found the magic word ‘multi-tasking’.

Enamoured by it I made conscious efforts to learn, practice and if not exactly perfect, at least take this skill to a workable level and add to my abilities.

Multitasking simply put, is doing more than one task at a time to attain multiple goals.

The word first used in 1965 to describe the capabilities of the IBM computer, meant running multiple sets of instructions (programs) on a computer at the same time. Slowly it started to be used for people too.

Over the time it became an addiction with me. I made it a habit to do two to three, sometimes more tasks at a time. You could see me follow any random combination simultaneously- cook maybe on three burners, bake, knit, embroider, talk on phone, attend to somebody, netsurf, watch television, read, jot down notes, sometimes even with music playing alongside, too many irons in the fire. I was a superhero mom, a multi-tasking marvel.

My translation, editing or writing assignments were the only area I failed to combine with any other job, so with a heavy heart I let it be.

My mother’s frequent insistence on ‘ek time par ek hee kaam karo na’ (Do one thing at a time, no?) would irritate me.

It was a while before I started noticing that dissatisfied with the quality of the work completed, I had to redo it in part or as a whole. I was ending up with burnt onions, boiled over milk, frequent need for frogging of needlework because of errors I had failed to notice in time, unclear emails, half-finished paperwork, falling back on deadlines, having to read something again, a window left open when it should not be (lizards would creep in and you know how I hate them). Sometimes I would forget if I locked the cupboard, switched off the gas, emailed the message, other times the task had been done on auto pilot without any consciousness or comprehension.

Often, I needed to recall where to pick up the task I was returning to and to decide which task to change to; I remembered only random information not necessarily the most important though.

My brainpower worked on various settings, and I was frequently changing control settings. My brain was always in the ‘start, focus, shift, restart, focus, shift …’ mode.

I felt I was carrying through several tasks concurrently, but I was merely shifting my focus from one thing to another, as a result not giving my 100 per cent to any of those.

The words of Extra Life author Steven Johnson aptly fitted my condition “… skimming the surface of the incoming data, picking out the relevant details, and moving on to the next stream. You’re paying attention, but only partially. That lets you cast a wider net, but it also runs the risk of keeping you from really studying the fish."

It was becoming physically and mentally taxing and stressful. It took me a while to diagnose the problem and phew, I found it. The skill that I had developed with such dedication and commitment was to blame.

It seems to me as if with the increased use of social media more and more people are trying to multitask. Don’t we all do it? 

Talk on the phone while typing

Work on social media while helping our child with homework,

listen to an audio book/podcast while driving

Watch television when visitors come to meet

Pretending to be busy to ignore what your spouse is saying should, however, be not included in this.

Nowadays multi-tasking is a keyword used by applicants for various jobs. The employers look for these people because one person doing several tasks helps them cut costs on hiring more staff. Do they actually mean multi-skilled?

Switching from task to task or in psychology parlance ‘task switch costs’ takes a toll on our mental faculties and abilities which need to fulfil a greater demand jumping from one thing to another. That is how some people get caught scrolling through social media during a meeting.

Surprisingly, in their research on multi-tasking activity and ability on participants in the University of Utah, researchers David M. Sanbonmatsu, David L. Strayer, Nathan Medeiros-Ward and Jason M. Watson found that people who perceive themselves to be multi-taskers overestimate their ability, and sadly, these overconfident ones generally lack the skills needed to be efficient in it. They also found that it was difficult to say who could multi-task as also that performance on individual tasks may suffer such that errors are made and overall productivity is diminished. 

So naturally, it made me sadder to know that Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass and Anthony D Wagner from Stanford University have concluded- ‘chronically high multi-taskers are more readily distracted by both irrelevant external stimuli and recently activated internal representations during singular task performance.’

Engaging in a single task can be boring, multi-tasking makes it more fun, if not always challenging. No wonder then that you have to shout out your questions to the garage mechanic singing tonelessly to the music coming out of his earphones.

Perhaps most of us avoid being labelled as impulsive, but psychologists say it is the impulsive people who carry out multiple tasks at a time because they are unable to resist the temptation of gaining quick rewards and sense of accomplishment.

However, it is not always these impulsive ones who choose to talk on cellphones. Those who do, could have made a conscious decision to use the phone while driving to save time and effort.

Dekho, dekho, dekho, who phone par baat kar raha hai (Watch out, he is talking on the phone), is my constant refrain sitting in the front passenger seat. How can somebody with attention spread so thin on the road, respond timely? For my own sake, I also avoid any serious discussions or decision-making in a moving car. For whatever it is worth, I love my life and do not want to lose a limb or life because of an idiotic, distracted individual in a moving machine.  

The researchers say that in the present times of ubiquitous use of media, teenagers have all the mental tabs open as they study. They warn that chronic, heavy multitasking can have a serious, long-term, negative impact on how the neural connections form in teenagers’ brain.

Before your kids argue with you that they are doing just fine, tell them research results are easily available on internet that netsurfing and emailing while studying is less harmful to academics than Facebook and texting.

The scary part is all this effort to accomplish so much together can jack up heart rate and blood pressure. And your doctor must have told you that constant increase in these can be risky for your well-being.

Psychologists also suggest that doing two tasks is fine if one is automated like listening to something while walking or watching TV on treadmill.

My experience has taught me that my brain wiring is of a ‘monotasker’; I can focus on and complete only one task at a time. Although I still use the phone while in the kitchen, I am generally working towards learning to focus on one thing at a time.

No more do I envy sweating singers dancing vigorously on stage. Perhaps like air traffic control personnel, it is a job they must do for the duration of a show. For me, es geht nicht (it doesn’t work), friend.

                                                                                                 - Anupama S Mani