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.
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Wow…what an incredible day. I’m still in Nashville attending the Robin Robins IT Marketing Bootcamp, and I have to say that today was a game changer for me. Mostly, the presenters just made a lot of sense: everything they said was stuff I know and talk about, but it really sunk in on a deeper level for me.
Me and Dave Crenshaw, author of The Myth of Multitasking
The day kicked off with Dave Crenshaw, author of “The Myth of Multitasking”. Dave talked about the negative impact the myth of multitasking has had on our society, a familiar subject to regular readers of this blog (see the blog post “The M-Myth” and the podcast “The Myth of Multitasking”). Dave’s insights into the workings of the human brain were fascinating, and it was great to learn that there is hope even for a mess like me.
Dave divides people into three categories: the Zen Master (you know the ones: always on time and organized to a sickening degree), the Prodigal (those who were organized at one time but have fallen into a pattern of disorder) and the Pig-Pens (people like me and Dave who are inherently chaotic and disorganized). Each deals with the chaos of life in their own way, but all of us have the same problem: only 24 hours in the day.
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I had a really compelling dinner conversation tonight with Jim Pelley, Karl Palachuk and Jeff Marmins (each a genius in his own right, in my humble opinion). One of the things we all agreed on, and the inspiration for this post, was what I’m going to start calling the M-Myth (if Michael Gerber is reading this, I hope he’ll remember that imitation is the sincerest kind of flattery).
The M-Myth was born in the Information Age, and it’s been plaguing business professionals and entrepreneurs for decades. It’s destroyed careers and businesses, occasionally even lives. What is the M-Myth? It’s the myth of multi-tasking.
Some people claim to have this ability, even wearing it as a badge of honor. They strut around with a misguided superiority complex, thinking that their ability to multi-task somehow puts them in the intellectual elite, with a brain so powerful, one task just isn’t enough! Well, here’s the bad news: multi-tasking is impossible! At least, that is, for humans. Computers can almost pull it off, but even they (as Karl points out in his book Relax, Focus, Succeed) have to chunk the separate tasks down into steps that get done one at a time; it just looks like multi-tasking because they do it really, really fast.
Jeff highlighted the impossibility of multi-tasking by using the simplest example: having a cup of coffee while doing some kind of work, let’s say writing a blog post. Some would consider this multi-tasking in its most basic form, but think about it for a minute. What’s really going on? Am I really doing two things simultaneously? No. In order to take a sip of my coffee, what do I have to do? That’s right: I have to stop writing my blog. Makes it pretty clear, doesn’t it? We really can only do one thing at a time. Multi-tasking is a myth, and a dangerous one at that. How so?
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