Like many productive, high functioning women, I’m very good at multitasking and I spend most of my working life doing it. Whatever you believe about how multitasking is or isn’t productive, it’s an important feature of my life and I’m spending time right now thinking about WHY and HOW I multitask.
I multitask because my experience is that it’s more productive. I do understand that one can’t genuinely and literally do more than one thing at a time, but one can do one passive thing (wait on the phone, for example, for someone to say something interesting on the phone or for the insane elevator music to be over and the person to come on the line and help me) or work in quick bursts on alternating tasks (good for certain types of problem solving and not others, since some problems are better solved through long, persistent work– I am, of course, by my nature better at solving the former than the latter). I am also easily bored; multitasking keeps my insane fear and hatred of boredom at bay.
More importantly, I multitask for an other emotional reason. Working on more than one thing blunts the impact of things that are difficult or make me anxious. A great example is conference calls. I multitask on conference calls partly because I CAN (ain’t it great working from home), because it’s efficient, but also because they make me a little nervous, and if I’m thinking about and doing other things, they make me less nervous.
Both of these things make multitasking somewhat addictive. When in-person meetings get tense or boring, and I can’t do anything about it, I long to be able to do something to blunt the anxiety or boredom. Would I be innured to it if I didn’t so often have the ‘out’ I have on conference calls of working on other things? Or would I just be bored and anxious more often? And less productive?
Thoughts? On multitasking?
