Win at Work: Navigate the Nasties, Get Things Done, and Get Ahead by Shaun Belding

Author:Shaun Belding [Belding, Shaun]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Careers, Success in business, General, Employability, Business & Economics, Career development
ISBN: 9780749459147
Publisher: Kogan Page, Limited
Published: 2010-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

The myths of workplace success 89

Myth #4: I’m multi-tasking

Multi-tasking has been one of the big buzzwords over the past decade. It’s often cited as a key requirement for hiring; and many tools – PDAs being a great example – abound to help us in this goal. There’s only one little glitch: multi-tasking, as many people perceive it, is quite literally an impossibility. Like it or not, our brains physically aren’t wired to focus on two things at once.

There’s a great little exercise that we do in our management training courses that illustrates this very well. We divide the class up into pairs, and give one person in each pair a one-page article on management skills, and the other person a 15-question questionnaire. The instructions are that the person with the article is to read the article aloud while the other person fills out the questionnaire.

When two minutes are up, the people who are taking the questionnaire are asked to recall all they can about the article that was read aloud. Inevitably, one of two things happens. Either they won’t get the questionnaire completed because they were concentrating too much on what was being read to them, or they will have the questionnaire completed, but little to no recall of what the other person had said.

Still not convinced? Well, if you’re still thinking that people can effectively multi-task, ask yourself this: How would you feel if your surgeon was checking messages on his BlackBerry during your surgery? How would you feel if your accountant was doing your taxes while watching a riveting movie?

Here’s the thing about multi-tasking. We can plan and schedule things so that we can have more than one project on the go.

And we can jump from one thing to the next and back again very quickly. But we just aren’t wired to give more than one thing our attention at any given moment in time. When we try, 90  Winning in the workplace

the inevitable result is that nothing gets done as well or as quickly as it should. Misguided attempts to ‘multi-task’ have significant implications on our overall success in the workplace.

To be successful at something, you have to be good at it. To be good at something, you have to focus on it. Distractions in the guise of ‘multi-tasking’ impact both the quality and speed with which things get done.

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