There is an age-old dispute between men and women about who is better at multi-tasking.
I don’t think there is actually a correct answer – women may argue that they are naturally better at being able to cope with more things at the same time , men may argue that they are criticised for only being able to concentrate on one thing at a time but surely that means they are 100% focused on that one thing?
I’ll be the first to admit that I often find myself multi-tasking, I think any administrative role (whether virtual or not) will require some form of multi-tasking. Just take a look at job advertisements, it’s one of the usual requirements in office positions along with “must use own initiative” and “must be efficient”. But surely we can’t be 100% focused on what we’re doing when we’re doing lots of other things at the same time?!
There is a myth surrounding multi-tasking that because we’re doing more, our productivity increases. A study reported in the BBC News suggests that there are 3 critical skills for successful multi-tasking, these are:
- Paying attention and screening out irrelevant information
- Organising working memory
- Ability to switch tasks
Without these skills, then multi-tasking could actually result in us wasting around 20-40 percent of our time, depending on what we’re trying to do. Basically multi-tasking doesn’t work as we can’t actually focus fully on more than one task at a time (regardless of gender!). But we think we can – so we multi-task to try and get more done. The thing we have to be careful with is quality. Whenever we switch tasks our minds are having to cope with new information on a rapid scale, we simply can’t devote our full concentration and focus to every change, so the quality of our work suffers.
Our stress levels could also increase whilst multi-tasking, making us feel overwhelmed and drained. Completing tasks one at a time means we’re able to focus and leaves us feeling satisfied that we’ve finished something well done.
Just for something interactive – try this test – it tells you how good you are at multi-tasking by measuring how quickly you can juggle tasks and how focused you are. My results are below and I’m quite pleased with them 🙂
Of course being able to focus on one thing at a time in the office or at work is all well and good… the home is an entirely different matter and, at the risk of opening a can of worms, I would have to say women are much better at multi-tasking in the home than men 🙂