SmartPulse — our weekly reader poll in Smartbrief on Workforce — tracks feedback from leading managers and HR practitioners. We run the poll question each Wednesday in our e-newsletter and feature analysis from SmartBrief on Workforce Senior Editor Mary Ellen Slayter on this blog.
Last week’s poll question: Do you consider yourself a “multitasker”?
- Yes, and I’m proud of it, 63%
- Yes, but I wish I could break the habit, 25%
- No, and I’m proud of it, 8%
- No, but I envy people who are, 5%
Like most of you, I’m a chronic multitasker. I don’t know that I’m proud of it, but I’m not sure how much I could do to help it. I readily concede that there’s likely a loss to the quality of my work, as many experts argue, but this will be a tough habit to break. Has anyone pulled it off?
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Just to throw something into the mix. There is no such thing as multi-tasking as the brain is a sequential processor. What we do is task switch. The term multi-tasking is an oxymoron in some ways but we seem to have switched on to it as a phrase of competence and power! Our problem is that we take these behaviours into cars and other situations that present obvious dangers and think we can overcome this. Go figure?!
John Medina has a lot of research on this (Harvard breakthrough thinker 2008) at http://brainrules.net/