Multi-tasking

Why is the ability to “multi-task” considered a virtue?

In my twenty-plus years of experience, multi-tasking short-changes everyone involved. Nothing gets one’s full attention: certainly, almost by definition, none of the multiple tasks engaged in near simultaneity. Because each task is not given full and undivided attention. Or it’s given such attention for however brief the period of time attention is focused on it before the interruption begins. And once the interruption is over, or once the interruption that interrupts the prior interruption is over, once attention returns to the original task, some degree of energy and will is needed to re-engage that original task.

It is the expenditure of the sum mental total of all these joules of “some degree of energy and will” that I find completely exhausting.

My job is predicated on accuracy. That accuracy affects – intimately so – over a hundred and sixty employees as well as the three owners of my company. Three other entities touch the data before and after it reaches me: the employee, his manager, and a third party outside company. (And sometimes other entities, too, if state agencies or the courts get involved.) I must maintain focus on the task in front of me, in essence, the accurate processing of this data. Or, if too many mistakes are made, I will soon be out of a job.

I get that I have to answer the phone if it rings. I get that if a manager runs in needing a fire put out, I have to help. I get that. I do that. But I have a low-tolerance for distraction and interruption, a threshold that I usually tactfully and tactically avoid but for every now and then. And every now and then, it don’t rain; it pours.

Don’t give me work where “multi-tasking” is considered an essential inherent factor in the process. Give me something to concentrate on, and I will do it better than 99 percent of the people out there, who’ve never honed such a skill due to all the time wasted managing interruption and distraction.