You’re Not Really Multitasking

How many things do you have going on right now?  How many things do you typically have going on at any given time?  During a typical workday, how many programs are open on your computer desktop? Is dinner cooking, laundry in both the washer and dryer, and a conversation occurring on the phone or with your kids? It may surprise you to find that you’re not doing all that at once.  And don’t take offense, but you’re not physiologically capable of doing it all at once.

Neither is your computer. You may have several programs open at once, but the processor in the guts of the machine is still handling instructions in the order it receives them. Even with the dual-core and quad-core processors built into the current  generation of computers, there are limitations as to how many and what type of activities can be conducted simultaneously.  If you’re curious about the nuts and bolts, this website has an explanation that comes pretty close to plain English: http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-dual-core-processor.htm
Most of us live our lives in a single-core scenario, even if we don’t want to admit it.  Instructions must be processed in a queue, and that queue may also include decisions, actions, and conversations. You may, for example, be on the phone and reading email “at the same time.”  Face it: you will miss a few words of the conversation if you read each word of the email. Or you will merely scan the email for important words or phrases so as to not miss anything important in the conversation.  But it is simply not possible to pay adequate attention to the phone conversation to catch every word while genuinely reading the email.  You cannot carry on two separate conversations simultaneously.  You will switch back and forth between them, but you will not give them both your full attention at the same time. Having said that, it is possible to engage in one activity that requires a great deal of attention and another that requires almost no attention. Examples of this: stirring a pot of soup on the stove while conversing with the children about homework; raking leaves while you converse on the phone. That’s because you can make use of muscle memory.  But if something happens to require more of you than your muscle memory can handle on its own, you will divert your attention from the primary activity onto the muscle-memory task.

That which we call “multitasking” is a lot like the physical act of juggling.  Juggling has a lot less to do with how many objects you have in the air than it has to do with what happens to each object as it lands in your hand.  Juggling isn’t so much about great catches as it is about great tosses.  You must toss each object into a place in the air where it will predictably end up in nearly the same spot. Your hand must, of course, also end up in nearly the same spot, but that’s much easier to accomplish than the toss.   I have not been able to accomplish a series of good tosses. I am physically inept at juggling.  With practice, and a great deal more patience than I normally exercise, I may be able to juggle three objects one day. “Multitasking” has started making more sense to me since I found the parallel to juggling.  The tasks I face at any given time cannot all be accomplished at once.  I have to select the most important objects and weigh them, then decide what to do with them. Each must end up in the air for a time.  And each will land, and hopefully each lands in my hand.  As it lands in my hand, I decide what to do with it: does it go back up into the air, or can it take it out of the mix, or do I need to hand it to someone else? You don’t need to freak out if you cannot multitask all the priorities in your day.  Handle each appropriately, or decide to set it aside. Toss into the air carefully. I promise you, no matter how good you think you are at “multitasking,” you’re nowhere near as good as your computer, and even your computer does it all one item at a time.