Multitasking is Real, Not a Myth
I’ve seen a fascinating juxtaposition when it comes to multitasking on LinkedIn in recent months as it relates to the proliferation of AI.
There are tons of posts arguing that it’s a myth, like this one. Many of these posts employ this argument to jump to the conclusion that AI should be used as much as possible, because no single person can get close to what AI can do in a fraction of the time.
Then there are posts like this one, which argue that not only is multitasking a real thing — it is one of a handful of pillars that will help workers future-proof themselves for a job market that is set to change in unfathomable ways over the next decades.
I can attest that multitasking is real.
The first post I linked to above, from Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Aditi Nerurkar, defines what we think of as multitasking as simply task switching — quickly going from one task to the next, but never doing more than one at a time.
However, I submit that workers — as well as, of course, business leaders — can transcend from task switching to true multitasking depending on how their brains are wired. And this depends, in part, on how our brains are nurtured in the workplace, encompassing hard deadlines, eagerness to meet the moment (ie, mindset), and, yes, even the stress that comes with rising to become a superhero in those moments.
When I think about how I’m wired to simultaneously work on multiple tasks within the span of a minute (which, admittedly, I can’t sustain continuously over a full-day shift, but I can do more now than I could 5 or 10 years ago), some key challenges in my career come to mind:
At Mission Recruiting, crunching the past week’s Marketing department numbers on Wednesday afternoon in preparation for a Thursday morning Zoom with my bosses, while communicating with my team and employees in the Recruiting department to publish and update client job listings.
At AppliancePartsPros.com, over a period of several weeks during a Facebook contest I launched and ran for them, moving from my project management and social media marketing responsibilities to refresh my screen showing the latest contest entries and manually removing the many fraudulent ones. (I would have given quite a lot in 2013 to have today’s automation technology to handle this much more quickly at scale.)
At the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, proofreading an annual, 100+ page guidebook for pharmacists while proofreading many other documents of various sizes and foci.
I’ll go even further to say that…
Increasingly, AI is a crutch for lazy or unfocused business leaders and, by consequence, for their teams. It’s a ubiquitous — and right now, sexy in the business and public consciousness — thing to jump to, instead of doing the harder work of mind rewiring to reach a level of multitasking nirvana.
Another way to say this is that I will always choose a highly motivated, well-trained employee or contractor over an AI chatbot or agent that’s intended for mass-market use.
Why?
Because, so far from what I’ve seen and tested in the AI marketplace, AI solutions require handholding and error troubleshooting that amounts to as much time, or more, than the time associated with an employee or contractor completing tasks that are customized to my specific needs. (And that’s not even factoring in potential privacy issues that come with AI usage.)
If you choose to lean on AI to scale your multitasking, understand that you’ll need to heavily babysit your solution(s). This is true on the front end for testing and initial results tweaking, and also over time as both your staffing and your customer or client needs and behaviors change.
What human multitasking looks like if you’re doing it right.
When I metamorphose — I’m not going to say switch, because it isn’t that — from one discrete micro task to another, in my head I’m thinking about these things at the same time; sometimes literally second to second:
What I need to do immediately.
What other immediate things I should jump to if needed, which might take me away from (1). One example is going from client work to responding to a new-client inquiry, if the in-progress client work is not due immediately.
And both of the above in the context of what matters most on my list for the current hour or multi-hour block of time.
My Google Calendar is my best friend. I’m constantly adding and rearranging 15-, 30-, and 60+ minute blocks in order to try to meet the 80-20 rule for my business.
Related post
With the right focus, you can get more done for your business in small increments when you’re technically in down time in the form of watching streamed movies or TV shows. I share how in this post.
