www.productivity501.com: Get 5 to 10 people to stand in a circle and ask them to go through the following sequences: First the alphabet, then count by 3s to 36, then count by 6s to 72. Each person says one item for the sequence and the person on their right says the next. This is pretty easy to do. It only takes a few minutes to go through all the different sequences when they are being done one at a time.
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This is an interesting experiment that I’m sure many of us can relate to since almost everyone has tried to multi-task at some point or another. I’m one of the fortunate ones who learned that multitasking really doesn’t work too well at a young age. This is experiment pretty much proves it since multitasking makes things a lot more difficult and confusing and is actually less efficient. If working in a team, which is critical since most techies are part of a team, this is huge information. While we do “multitask” a lot, the production manager is in charge of keeping all the tasks going at a steady pace. The difference is that each discipline goes one step at a time and doesn’t try to build everything all at once or paint everything all at once. If multiple things are going on, we delegate. I would definitely take the authors advice and make sure individually we’re all working on our tasks linearly and not trying to bite a chunk off from each at one time.
As someone who is very bad at multitasking, I didn’t find the first part of this article very surprising. I’m pretty sure I’m even worse at multitasking than the average person, since if I try to do more than one thing at a time I’m inefficient to the point of basically not actually getting anything done.
In terms of the second part of this article, I’ve never had much issue with having a boss ask me to do things in such a way that I feel like I need to do multiple things at once. That being said, I think that might be because if I’m asked to do something when I’m already doing something, I almost always immediately ask “Would you like me to finish _____ first?” or “Okay, as soon as I come to a stopping point on _____.” I’ve never even really thought about the fact I do that, I think it has just been my automatic response to being asked to do something when I’m already doing something. That being said, I haven’t ever had a boss try to push me to do multiple things at once. If I ask “should I finish ____ first?” I can’t remember ever getting an answer other than “No, finish ____ first” or “Yes, switch to blank _____.” I guess I have to consider what I’d say if someone actively tries to get me to do two things at the same time.
Fascinates me how the human brain works. This summer working a summer camp we played a game called Buzz Wow. The purpose of his children's game was to keep the kids thinking while still being indoors at a summer camp. The kids would lineup and count 1 to 50 only saying buzz on the multiples of five and only say wow on the multiples of 10. Easy enough right? The answer is no. It's continually got distracted by what the other kids were saying, correcting them and anything that would be caught in their field of vision. The adult brain works very similar to this while trying to complete a task. I see this article coming into play my life as I talk about time management and procrastinating. So often I wait to the last second to do projects and then try to do them all at once. Well how my supposed to focus on doing well on a project when I have another project on my mind as well as any distraction that would walk into the studio? The answer just like the children is I wouldn't and my work would suffer. Thus, I hope to take out of this article how to better manage my time and complete my task better by not overextending myself to double tasking.
Multi-tasking is a skill everyone tries to do in order to make their lives easier. Multi-tasking often has the opposite affect of the goal of efficiency since each task gets less attention therefor takes longer to complete. When you multi-task you are not putting as much effort in each task as you normally would, if you were doing them each individually. The quality of your work will be lower if you are doing more than one thing at once because they are not getting your full attention and skill level. It seems like you are being more efficient because you are doing two things at once when you could do them at two separate times. Some times multi-tasking can be faster but it depends on the tasks you are doing at the same time and how much effort each one takes. I multi-task by listening to music and doing homework at the same time, but listening to music definitely slows down how fast I can do my homework because I cannot concentrate as well.
This article definitely presents valid arguments that I resonate with. Whenever I multitask, I just end up with a tiny amount of work done for each project that I've been juggling while I could've gotten a significant amount of work done for a single project if I wasn't multitasking. On top of the lack of efficiency, I've also noticed that the quality of my work is lower if it was done through multitasking. Especially in certain group projects, each group member getting delegated a single job can be a lot more efficient and successful than having all group members work on the entire project together all at the same time (of course this depends on what kind of project it is and not every group project works best this way). Even for crew, we are each assigned one task at a time rather than everything that needs to be done for the night. As efficient as the word "multitasking" sounds, it's really not.
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