Multitasking

Column by David Ryan Polgar | Illustration by Russ Hicks

In the 2011 sci-fi thriller In Time, residents race against ticking clocks embedded in their bodies. When a person’s clock runs out, he or she literally expires. To get more precious minutes, desperate citizens beg, steal, and borrow time.
The theme of the movie seems pretty clear: we have a deeply embedded fear that we are running out of time. Constantly hearing the mantra that “time is money,” we anxiously look for ways to increase our productivity—to create more time. Overwhelmed with the number of activities we need to accomplish every day, we’ll do almost anything to be more efficient. The current method to create more time is to multitask, based on the premise that juggling multiple activities will take less time than doing each activity separately. Do we actually create more time by multitasking?

It depends. Certain tasks, such as knitting while watching television, seem perfect for doing simultaneously. If a person does a half-hour of quality knitting over the hour time period, he or she will effectively “create” thirty minutes that can be used elsewhere. A minute saved is a minute earned. Although the mind’s focus has been divided, the outcome is successful because neither task was extremely mentally taxing.

Multitasking becomes less effective when activities demand a high degree of concentration. When doing a work project that requires a good deal of focus and creativity, multitasking may actually add to the time it takes to complete the task. For example, if over the course of an hour, a person works on a project while regularly checking email—tasks that would separately have taken only 25 minutes each—as many as 10 minutes might be lost to toggling back and forth. If tasks require significant mental focus, which email and creative projects do, multitasking diverts attention and detracts from each. In our effort to create more valuable time, constantly switching our attention may be counterproductive.

Popularized by management gurus in the late 1990s, multitasking has been accepted as conventional wisdom by most people. In the last few years, though, there has been a groundswell of support for monotasking. What both sides are forgetting is that people should not have to choose between the two. Instead, the decision of whether to multi task or not should depend on the activities at hand—what I like to call “smart multitasking.”

I’m no exception to feeling like I’m running out of time. I’m also drawn in by the allure of multitasking. At the gym recently, I was exercising on the elliptical machine while watching the news and checking/deleting emails on my smartphone. Despite subtle feelings of data overload, this was most likely effective multitasking because none of my activities required high cognitive thinking. It would have been a bad idea, however, if I had sent an important email while working out. Despite the potential efficiency, I would have been more prone to grammatical and other errors because of my reduced focus. This is similar to my tendency to utter dumb answers to my wife when I’m distracted by the TV or computer. It’s also why drivers using cell phones dramatically increase their chances of an accident.

Multitasking is a process that only works under select conditions. In our battle to create time, the weapon of choice will be smart multitasking. There is no need to beg, steal, and borrow time—but there is a need to be intelligent about it.

Besides writing essays and plays, David Ryan Polgar is an attorney and college professor. He resides in West Hartford with his wife Leslie. For more information, visit www.DavidRyanPolgar.com.