Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy. One man’s odyssey through the nightmare of infinite connectivity. ^
It tears us up, how we rush. Someone we recognize as an authority, or as representing our target audience, tells us something is important, so we add it to the list and mechanically run through each item every day if we can.
I think this comes from the feeling of unpredictability to a modern world. We don’t know what the right thing to do is, as pagans “suckled in a creed outworn” were able to do. There’s no real unifying principle to the modern world. We earn money to live, and we find a place to live, and food, and insurance, and a car, and then what?
Back to the usual agenda: live, breed, die. But in this modern world, we find it hard to have a center. It’s not like being in the Army, where there’s a clear goal, or in prison, where the lack of goal substitutes for a goal. What’s the point? People often ask. They want a Lord of the Rings style quest.
Multitasking is not the latest of the many fads that attempt to convince us we can handle this overload. About two years ago it hit required buzzword status on the job application boards. Few stopped to question whether it wasn’t better to make more choices about what is important, and so have fewer things to do, and to do them better.
It’s like we’re trying to do everything because we lack a singular goal and so we’re trying to cover all our bases. From a psychological standpoint, it’s silliness.
Individuals, like businesses, benefit from having mission statements. These mission statements are summaries of a series of related goals, and so you don’t have to make them laundry lists. “Be a good person,” for example, might include being a moral citizen, having a family, being well-rounded, earning a good living for that family, recycling.
Too often, managers are skittish and scared, and so become neurotic like housewives in movies from the 80s, and so can’t make a decision so end up trying to do everything at top speed. The result is chaos.
In your average office, you can see this mentality most clearly in the refrigerator. Almost all of them have signs that say “We throw out everything on Friday,” but in reality, this never happens until someone complains there’s a stinker in back. They are like a geological record of who went to eat where, who was too busy for the sandwich she bought, what excess soft drinks are floating around, the condiments left over from one or more all-nighters.
In the office fridge, as in life, people haven’t slowed down to figure out what they’re actually doing. They throw stuff onto the pile, and move on, because something else has distracted them. They are distracted because they are overloaded and so everything that comes to them is newly a crisis. Other people are also in this crisis mode and hand things along without thinking. Soon we’re just shifting piles of junk around from one desk to another.
But now, thanks to widespread incompetence, American management is on its way to becoming an international laughingstock. Faith in American financial sobriety has been widely undermined by the subprime mess. The very mention of the strong-dollar policy now elicits raucous bouts of knee-slapping in even the most sober Swiss banks.
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Carl Icahn, the 1980s corporate raider, has reinvented himself as a borscht-belt comedian/activist investor, who delights conferences and reporters with jokes at CEOs’ expense. On a recent 60 Minutes, Icahn complained to Lesley Stahl about the incompetence of American management. “I see our country going off a cliff, and I feel bad about it.” ^
A good manager fixes this by cutting responsibilities and projects, if even arbitrarily. You might end up axing something necessary and having to rebuild, but then you can do so in a focused, non-neurotic environment. For a long time, managers were afraid to make these cuts because of the myth of multi-tasking, which supposed that the most productive employee was simultaneously on the phone, taking notes, updating the company web site and sending out meeting alerts on his or her BlackBerry.
It’s good to see the press attack this fallacy.
Image from MethCola
[...] I’ve written about the illusion that multitasking is more effective before. It’s not, because instead of completing a task and moving it into the workflow where [...]