Multi-tasking – doing things badly in twice as much time

Do you love to multi-task?  Talking on the phone with the computer on your lap while the TV or radio is on? Working on multiple windows in your computer? Answering email, talking on MSN and trying to read a news article at the same time?

Do you think you are good at it?

You’re not.

Sorry that probably didn’t sink in.

You’re NOT. NOT good at multitasking.  How do I know this? Research from Stanford University shows that NO ONE is.

Professor Clifford Nass has been doing a series of experiments on people who multi-task using interactive media. When he began the experiments, he figured there would be certain things that some multi-taskers would be good at. He was wrong.

“It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking,” he says. “They’re terrible at ignoring irrelevant information; they’re terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized; and they’re terrible at switching from one task to another.”

Ah you say, but you’re different right? You know you’re good at multi-tasking. Probably not says Nass

“However, when we talk with the multi-taskers, they seem to think they’re great at it and seem totally unfazed and totally able to do more and more and more. . … It’s very troubling. And we have not yet found something that they’re definitely better at than people who don’t multi-task.”

But I can hear you saying “there is so much work to be done and I’m exhausted. I just don’t have time to do one thing at a time.” First of all you need to set your priorities so you have less things to do. You can look at these posts to help you with that side of things.

• Don’t Multitask – Try Synergy instead.

There is however something you can do to accomplish more than one goal at a time without actually trying to do two things at once. This is known as synergy.

Running a TV newsroom was a crazy 24/7 job. There were always so many things to do – from staying on top of the news to training people, doing performance reviews, managing remote offices to making sure the terms of our broadcast license were followed.

To keep from being totally overwhelmed I tried to develop a system of thinking that would allow me, as much as possible, to accomplish two or more goals with every action or decision.

Here’s an example. The commission that regulates Canadian television is always trying to promote diversity in news content – representation from designated groups such as visible minorities, people with disabilities and Aboriginal Canadians. It’s a laudable goal and one I agree with.  But for a broadcaster it’s also important because the same commission has power over all the broadcast licenses in the country.

Because this issue is related to licensing it’s typical for some broadcasters to think of diversity stories something separate that they have to do when their license renewal comes up.

I wanted to do things differently. I instructed my staff to always be thinking of using people of different diverse backgrounds whenever they did ANY story.  I praised them when they did this which was a great motivator. As a result they were more productive and produced more stories. Because we had the courage to approach these news stories in a different way, the stories themselves were original and well thought out. The quality of our content had never been higher.

In the history of our network up to the time I had taken over we hadn’t won a single journalism award. After launching this new approach we immediately won one of the most prestigious TV journalism awards in the country following a series we did on Black History.  The next year we won another – an international award for a story we did on a blind woman who was learning to sail. The year after, we won a third –this time for a profile of a blind man and his new seeing-eye dog.  (The last two reports you can see below)

We didn’t have the resources to enter many award shows but those we did we almost always won.

So to recap here’s what I did:

1. Communicated a slightly new approach to telling news stories.  It didn’t take long. An email. A chat. Some praise along the way.

Here’s what I accomplished

1. More news stories
2. Great original content
3. Motivated employees
4. Improved our standing with the broadcast commission
5. Awards that brought prestige to the company

I’m not going to lie to you. This one thing ultimately brought me more positive notoriety both inside and outside the company than anything else I did there. And it’s something that took me the least amount of effort. To be fair, I didn’t know we would win those awards but I did know that I could get the stories, make the broadcast commission (and the company) happy with our diversity and motivate my employees at the same time. I had a feeling the stories would be pretty original too.

Not every thing you do will be that successful but if you are clear about what your goals are, it is not that difficult to achieve more than one objective with a single accomplishment.

Blind Sailing story by Kelly Noseworthy and Dwayne Oud

World Medal Winner – NY Festivals

Seeing Eye Dog story by Shelley Steeves and Jeremy Chipper

World Medal Winner – NY Festivals

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Tagged as: high performer, leadership, misconceptions, multi-tasking, synergy, technology, time management, urgent