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The Myth of Multitasking

Have you ever thought “I wish I could clone myself” as an answer to accommodating your overbearing workload? I have, and if you are like me you often go home at the end of a grueling work day and wonder how you could work so hard, but accomplish so very little.

And if you ever went back to work the next day thinking “I’ll just work harder to be a better multitasker“, you may find yourself in the downward spiral that I did; working harder and harder, longer and longer, yet getting less and less completed.

Dave Crenshaw explains this conundrum quite deftly in his new book titled ‘The Myth of Multitasking: How “Doing It All” Gets Nothing Done‘.

I got the book over the Christmas holiday and placed it neatly on my desk so I could ‘get to it next’. Each day I moved it further and further away from my top of mind as I stacked items on and around it while my days seemed to overwhelm me with tasks, interruptions and emergencies. Finally, and late one night, I found myself with a few minutes of breathing room and grabbed the book for what I thought would be a brief scan of a few pages just to get started.

I’ve never devoured a book so intently; I read the whole thing in one sitting. I literally turned the world off as I became lost in it’s message that I was trying to do too much at once, and learning it’s lesson as to why I feel like I am never getting anything done. Crawling into bed that evening (it was 3:00 a.m.) I actually felt refreshed and excited to get back to work after the weekend with a new understanding of my own work habits, and fresh ideas on how to get more done without killing myself.

And that was just it: Dave Crenshaw explains in a remarkably concise book that multitaskers are killing themselves with a false notion that we can do more things at once and be effective at anything. The truth is, and I am evidence of it based on my own experience, that when we multitask we are not actually doing two or more things at once, but rather we are switching between those tasks rapidly. Crenshaw convincingly explains that there is a hidden cost to switching, and that the net result is more costly than if we were to focus on each item separately and distinctly. He even gives a two minute exercise that illustrates this problem so profoundly that I almost started to cry as I realized my feelings of being overwhelmed could be resolved with this single understanding: That multitasking is a myth.

I am now working on putting these few simple principles into action, and I have already seen results. I can recognize when I am multitasking, and quickly work to resolve the dilemma with focus on a specific item. It will take a while for me to incorporate these lessons into my lifestyle, after all I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 years ‘perfecting’ my ability to multitask, only to reach the conclusion that, all along, I have been eroding my effectiveness.

If you are an average reader, you can probably read Dave Crenshaw’s book The The Myth of Multitasking in just a couple of hours. If you are feeling overwhelmed and constantly ‘out of time’, it will be two of the best hours you could spend. I am glad I read it, and look forward to reading it again.

You can find Dave Crenshaw online at http://www.davecrenshaw.com/ and you can buy The Myth of Multitasking: How “Doing It All” Gets Nothing Done
online from Amazon

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