Spinning Plates: It’s Not the M-Myth – Guest Post by Joel D Canfield

It’s true: humans can’t multitask. As Jerry may have said (and if not, I’m saying it), it’s a fact, not an opinion; accept it and get over it.

You can’t multitask. But you can still do more than one thing at a time.

Remember the guy on Ed Sullivan who, um, right; you have no clue who Ed Sullivan was. Anyway, there was this thing called a ‘variety show’ on something called ‘television’ with ‘entertainers’ who, y’know, did stuff.

There was always some guy who’d come out with a bunch of six foot tall sticks on stands. Skinny sticks, maybe half an inch thick. He’d set a china plate on top of one, start it spinning, then keep it spinning with the stick. It’s a cool trick, and not as hard as it looks. Do not discuss this subject with my mother; it seems to upset her.

Anyway, once the first plate was spinning, he’d start another. Get it spinning, check the first one to be sure it was spinning well, and start a third. Check the first two, and start a fourth.

Eventually, he had a lot of plates spinning. A lot.

So, here’s the thing: how many plates do you think he touched at the same time?

One.

If he started grabbing two of the sticks to get the plates spinning, he couldn’t possiblly look at two plates at the same time. One or the other was dust.

He could prepare by putting his hand on the next stick, so that the instant his eyes moved to that plate he was ready to spin, but it was always one at a time, one at a time.

Here’s a dirty secret the computer geeks don’t want you to know: computers don’t actually multitask, either. Nuh uh. Not really. The unitask, one task at a time, jumping from one spinning plate to another so fast that it appears to be working on all of them simultaneously.

Now, that, you can do.

Get a plate spinning. Once you know that process or project is moving, and doesn’t need your immediate attention (whether it’s because it’s waiting on input from someone else, or because others have been trained to manage the next step) move on to the next project. Keep monitoring each project, but have systems in place that let the plates spin with their own momentum without needing your attention every single moment. (Yeah, this means you have to let go of control. One more thing to get over.)

You cannot safely drive and talk on the phone. You cannot listen to the client on the phone while reading email. You can’t work on business while spending time with your significant other or the kids.

But you can spin a whole lotta plates all at once, because plates have momentum.

Joel D Canfield is a Business Heretic and author of The Commonsense Entrepreneur, one of the 5 best business books Jerry has ever read.