Multitasking - always tricky, often silly

Posted on September 9, 2006
Filed Under Business Management |

Q. Tell us about a time in the past few years when you felt totally overloaded with work. What caused the situation to develop? How did you handle the work overload?

A. For ten years I’ve handled multiple clients with multiple projects working simultaneously. Whenever I feel overloaded with work it’s because I am. Let me explain how to handle it.

Our view switches from local to global, global to local. When we focus on a piece of work, we’re local, when we sit back and review all the projects on our desk, we’re global. One minute the worker, next minute the manager of all the workers (even if we’re the only worker).

So, overload is a condition of management, it means we have too many pressing concerns fighting for conscious activity at the same time. The only solution is to go global and re-arrange the flow of work coming into our local focus, into our field of actual execution.

Multitasking itself reduces either quantity or quality, and there is a trade-off between the two. We can only focus on one thing at a time, and each thing ever done is done better for having received undivided attention. But not all tasks require full attention when measured against the ruling standard of quality.

So actually if there are other things to be done within the same time period, we can choose to lessen the attention given to one thing in order to give partial attention to another, and accomplish them both together.

This is how we pick up the baby while we go to the kitchen, and answer the phone and fold clothes and prepare food for baby, all at once. The point about this multitasking is that we’d better have a standard of quality that says the baby’s safety gets more attention than the pot on the stove boiling over, and we need to keep clear the sequence of actions to deal with this - put baby down safe, then go to the stove, for example.

So that’s what overload is. We have to know what our obligations and freedoms are to manage the workloads we incur, and we have to remain aware of the quality and quantity standards ruling the field of work. Simple. Tough.

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