Multi-tasking has become a desired, and almost expected, way of being.
If you don’t have a few things on the go, whether in your work or home life, you feel you may be seen as not busy, not capable and possibly not effective.
You fear you may not be seen as a potentially good employee unless you can list a long string of tasks you perform as a multi-tasker under pressure.
Young mums try desperately to live up to the ‘women are good multi-taskers’ label, especially when juggling work and home life.
People tend to boast about their multi-tasking prowess which alludes to the opposite (uni-tasking) as being less virtuous and valued.
Yes, creativity, innovation and discoveries can be attributed to being multi-tasked and multi-skilled, allowing spontaneity and serendipitous coincidences to occur; and apparently, some studies show we can actually train our brains to multi-task; however, it is not, strictly speaking, the way we should live our daily lives if we want to be effective and contented human beings.
Luckily, and interestingly, multi-tasking has been blown out of the water as a myth regarding human brain information-processing.
I also suspect assuming you should be a constant multi-tasker may be contributing to higher anxiety levels generally.
In a world of technological over-stimulation and fast-paced lives, this is something we should maybe take a closer look at.
Multi-tasking = good, right?
Where did we even get the idea that multitasking is a good thing?!
In fact, multi-tasking was a term used to describe how computers worked back in the 1960s and has only been used as a term for human-brain activity relatively recently.
Even though we reference our brain as a type of supercomputer, it is not.
Our brains are not naturally capable of multi-task functioning!
Yes, our brains are capable of rapidly switching from task to task, but this is not doing two or more things simultaneously, as multi-tasking implies and computers do all the time.
This switching has its cost to our cognitive brainpower, our perception and general information-processing; one cost is not storing information successfully for retrieval at a later time.
The preference for watching a Netflix film or series on your laptop/tablet, while scrolling your smartphone, sending and reading emails, checking news alerts, along with constantly switching between Instagram, Snapchat and Tik Tok, all to the soundtrack of your Spotify playlist, is not an efficient way of consuming information: we are just scanning everything at once.
This is the way we live though.
We have multiple devices on the go, all the time.
Eventually, our brains may adapt to this, however, human evolution takes its own sweet time.
Until then, if we become aware of how our brains are wired, we can work with it, not against it.
- Your brain cannot perform tasks simultaneously, unless one is automatic and is not engaging the ‘thinking process ‘– driving, for instance.
- If you are trying to multi-task, you are only flitting between one task and the other rapidly, making you a ‘Jack of all trades, Master of none’. You will get stuff done, but how well?
- What about any learning – like ‘method-retention’ – in order to repeat the task efficiently next time?
- Learning in order to get those grades?
- Learning in order to commit information to your long-term memory store for later retrieval? (yes, I know we have Google but it’d be nice to retain information rather than constantly looking it up on our devices; those answers, as we all know, rest in our short-term memories for a nanosecond)
Multi-Tasking and Anxiety
Multi-tasking may affect us negatively by causing ‘information-overload’:
Our poor brains try to weed out which task is more important – to prioritise perceived dangers, for instance, in double-quick time – as it struggles to do things in some sort of order, which is how our brains work.
This eventually upsets the brain’s preferred, if not required, measured cognitive responses, as it settles speedily on a possibly erroneous evaluation of reality: referencing similar actions it used before, or just reflexive reactions.
Distorted thinking, worry and stress can ensue.
Worst-case scenario: burnout.
Be a Serial Uni-Tasker!
- Have a ‘to-do list’
- Prioritise it, setting times for your tasks, getting through them ONE BY ONE (sequentially – one task following the other). You may do less in a day, but you do it properly and completely. This is essentially ‘serial uni-tasking’.
- Doing work/study with Spotify playing a shuffle of 90’s hits, for example, is not, strictly speaking, multi-tasking as the music is background noise and not being focused on by the brain.
In this instance, you are uni-tasking: effective while studying for the Leaving Cert or college exams; working in a busy open-plan office; what parents do when managing a busy household
- You can switch from one task to another, but only after an allowed time working on each; say, twenty-five or thirty minutes
By doing this you stand a very good chance of completing all, or most of, your tasks.
You will feel a sense of satisfaction from a job done, rather than a sense of impending doom and stress, which you will certainly feel, after half-doing loads of things, but not finishing even one to the best of your ability.
Remember, due to our inbuilt negativity-bias, we concentrate on the one negative out of several positives……
Multi-tasking feeds into this bias as we are probably setting the bar too high about what we can realistically achieve in a given block of time.
Also, we need to build in contingencies: interruptions, breaks and more pressing urgencies/unforeseen crises.
So being a ‘serial uni-tasker’ is probably what we should all be aiming for.
Tips to help you Uni-Task:
- Concentrate only, and fully, on a Netflix film by putting your phone/laptop/tablet on silent and, if not in another room, then somewhere away from you for the duration of that film.
- Give yourself an allotted amount of time to scroll your Instagram feed to have a look at what your friends are up to. Maybe click on a video clip
- and concentrate fully on the content. You may enjoy it more and learn something from it rather than just quickly scanning it.
- Listen to podcasts that interest you
- Tik Tok/Snapchat: Maybe have this more as a shared thing with friends so you are not falling into a rabbit-hole of absently scrolling through content, losing precious time in the process, or, as with your Instagram, allocate a slot of time to them.
- Select a David Attenborough wildlife documentary, for instance, and get wholly absorbed in it (this is mindfulness in action) allowing your brain to register the information fully. Then give someone a summary of it!
What uni-tasking allows you to do is fabricate a structure: loose enough to build-in constant changes, revisions; allowing unforeseen circumstances to interrupt you, as such is life.
But it’s a structure all the same; a flexible webbing of support to bounce around and fall off, but to jump back onto at a moment’s notice.
This allows you to continue with your life, leaving you time to actually enjoy it, minimising anxiety and worry, which causes time-wasting and feelings of inadequacy.
- A full, disorganised and overloaded brain, attempting to multi-task, causes you to live from a place of chaos; firefighting, falling from one drama to another; rather than from a place of peace, contentment and order.
- A brain that is using a serial uni-tasking method, with the aid of planning and a loose structure to operate from, is allowing a smoother run of things, giving you a balanced life.
So, which one would you choose?!
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