We, like our forefathers, live in an age where a day is made up of 24 hours. But, unlike our forefathers, the things we can do – we have to do – in these 24 hours have increased manifold. So, not surprisingly, we find ourselves short of time.
Problems are nothing new to man. From times immemorial, he has faced problems and found ingenious ways to deal with them. To tackle the shortage of time, he is now facing, man discovered multitasking – the act of performing many jobs at the same time. The idea of multitasking gained popularity with the advent of the computer. The computers could multitask, and by multitasking the performance of computers increased dramatically. If the computer could do it, so could he, man thought.
For the past few years, the general belief has been that a man who can multitask is more efficient than the man who can’t. So, most of us have been trying to master the art of multitasking. I am no exception.
However, multitasking is good, if it is good at all, only for tasks that are routine and not important. Most of the activities that human beings perform, especially creative ones, require complete attention. And if that attention wanders then either the performance of the activity is hampered, or the activity is performed sub-optimally.
Let us take the example of writing a blog post. When you are writing a post, you are constantly thinking of ways to make the post better. You are looking for the right words, for the right image that you could use with your post. It takes sometime to get into the thinking mode. If in the middle of it, you receive a message from a chat friend, your mind is distracted. After you are done with the chat, you have to get into the “writing post” mode allover again. The post that you could have written in 30 minutes, takes many hours, and sometimes it never gets written.
Not only that, the quality of the post also gets affected by the continuous distractions that we face while we are multitasking.
In the earlier days, I tried hard to master the art of multitasking,and, to some extent, I was successful. But, now, I feel that there are times when it is best not to multitask.There are times when it is better to focus on one thing at a time. You could actually get more done that way.
Do you multitask? Do you think it affects you in a negative way?
What do you think?