Myth of multitasking

We have all been there, adding “Multitasking” as a skill in our resume. Ever since we were kids, we have been taught that being able to juggle multiple things at once, is a skill, and a skill well appreciated in the world. We have seen our mothers doing it at home, all the time, we have seen our fathers doing it – we have seen how admirable someone becomes if they’re busy all the time doing a lot of tasks, accomplishing something no one can even imagine. We have been fascinated, as kids, as teenagers and as we grew up – we wasted no time, learned that skill, and added it in our resumes to prove to the world that we, in fact, can balance and manage all the million things that you could throw at us to handle, and we will exceed expectations, every damn time.

Now of course, who doesn’t want a worker who can manage 10 things at a time? each of them flawlessly. Also, if someone is able to complete 10 tasks in 10 days one by one, that would just not work in the world where everything is “Urgent” & “Important” all the time. Our skill needs to be, to be able to do progress on each of those 10 tasks, at the same time, providing updates of progress periodically while we do it, while giving each of them equal and enough importance because Quality, solve problems as they arise and deliver each of the task at time. In order to accomplish this, we have 30 tabs open on our computers, 30 more in our minds, and somehow two screens are not enough to tackle all that work. Now of course, we are trusted, because we have listed “Multitasking” as one of our Strengths in that SWOT analysis and also, and have proven through track record that we can, in fact, as an individual accomplish multiple complex tasks in given time, with reasonable quality.

I boasted and in fact, leveraged from this skill, until I didn’t. I have, in past established myself as one of those professionals, who can juggle multiple projects at once, progress balanced in each of those, and provide quality results. Needless to say, even though I loved every part of my job, I was not having fun – because I was never on time. Even though I was accomplishing overall tasks on time, while doing it, in the middle of it, I was always running late. There was always that “pendency pressure”, because no matter many tasks I completed, I still had a few more. This was still understandable, as we all work in the corporate environment when everything you are supposed to do today was needed yesterday. There was something much more personal, fundamental happening, which didn’t feel right when I was in the middle of this sea of tasks I took up day on day, week on week, month on month.

One day, I was reading something, and this quote by Haemin Sunim came up, “Your mind can not hold two thoughts at once.” He used it in a different context in the book, but I was immediately led to verify it. I tried thinking two thoughts at the time, two separate thoughts, not one branching of another, two entirely separate thoughts. I couldn’t. Try it out right now, think about what you had for dinner, and what brand of shampoo you use – at the same time, it is impossible. Even though it may seem to you that you are able to, there is still a small distinction between these two thoughts, one occurs first and then the other. No matter how overlapped it seems, only one single thought can occupy your entire mind at one time. If you think another thought, your mind shifts focus onto that another thought, and the skill we develop while juggling between these multiple thoughts, defines the speed of how fast we can transition from one to another, and that results in multitasking.

So, essentially, neurologically, every time you have a thought, millions of neural networks in your brain are focused on building that thought, and as you go on continuing that thought, these neural networks produce the results in shape of ideas, problems getting solved and tasks getting accomplished. Now, as any simple structure, one thought builds up on the other and that sequence builds up a result – pretty simple. For example, if you are thinking what to make for dinner, you would start by thinking about what ingredients you have, from there you would decide what to make, the extra ingredients you would need, how much time you have to prepare, and whether everyone in the family would like it. This entire flowchart of thoughts happens in seconds, giving you the result of an item that you’ll be having for dinner. Now, if I ask you to recommend me shampoo brands while you decide upon your dinner, here is how it would go :

You will start by thinking about what ingredients you have, what brands of shampoo do I use? What I should make? No that brand gave me dandruff the last time , I think I could order some cheese and bread, I think that herbal shampoo would be a good suggestion – and so on. Eventually, you will give both the answers. Now, how confusing it was to read above two lines and interpret them versus the one before, where we just discussed dinner? That’s the struggle your brain experiences every time you ask it to do more than one thing at a time, or hold more than one thought.

Now, human brain is one of the most amazing miracles to happen, it can sustain and work flawlessly like this, but every time you ask it to juggle between tasks, it goes from one thought to another, back to the first, and to another a million times before you are done with the tasks. Each shift, involves pre-created neural connections to come together, build a few, destroy it in the next second, go on to the next one, build it in the same way, only to destroy it when we switch tabs and come back to the first where we build the earlier connections all over again. And that results in “fatigue”. The tiredness, the loss of focus at times, the lack of awareness over time that we face, is caused by this constant juggling of thoughts.

Every time you multitask, your brain is building this complex networks over and over again, and it tires us out, plus the added stress of “pendency pressure”, lowers the brain capacity again, because we are operating on “survival mode”.

After this discovery, I started paying attention to how my brain processed, and of course it was conditioned to work in this mode since a long time. As an experiment, I divided my tasks into bigger chunk of time rather than multiple tabs open at once and doing many tasks at one time. During that chunk of time, and sometimes for an entire work day whenever it permitted, I focused on only one task – putting complete hold on to all the other tasks, and as a result :

I allowed the neural networks to fully form and connect, resulting into better ideation.

The absence of stress allowed me to relax, and helped me reach the state of flow.

Over time, I learned to build a thought faster, and reach to conclusion faster.

I didn’t feel tired much after a task, while bringing same productivity, even better quality – because my brain was not working overtime now juggling between the tasks.

I was able to still cope up with the expectations at work, by just demanding a little bit of autonomy on how I do my work.

Only thing that seemingly changed was, I didn’t seem like the most busy person in the world, because whatever is the opposite of “Multitasking”, looks really calm and organized and relatively “free” in real life to others!

You might think that your life routine or work doesn’t allow you to work in large chunk of time allocation, I would recommend applying it into small duration of time. For example, if you have 2 tasks to accomplish in 10 minutes, do the first one in 5 and the other one in the other 5 minutes, without going for the most “optimal” way, your brain might just thank you!

I plan to write on this topic more in future, and explore how everyone's To-do lists can not function the same way, and how we can design our ways of accomplishing the goals without tiring ourselves out.