Multi-Tasking Was A Myth

I remember early on my career being coached for interviews that a popular question that would be asked would be “how are you at multi-tasking”? I was told that I should unequivocally lie and say “I am great at it”. At the time, it didn’t seem like lying because I, like most other people, thought I was great at multi-tasking. How wrong was I!

We now know that multi-tasking is terrible for productivity and comes with a cost. It is no different than context switching and we have all accepted that context switching is bad for productivity. Deep thought and multi-tasking do not go hand in hand. Most of us do our best work in deep thought in an attempt to develop a sense of flow, of piecing together multiple strands of a problem, thinking and mulling over the problem at hand. What I think most likely gets confused for multi-tasking is more on queuing work. For example, would you kick off some type of long process that required no input from you and wait until it was over to work again? Or would you, like most sensible people, work on something else while that batch is processing? I can’t imagine anyone not being able to figure that out, but at the time it was a thing.

For now on, if asked, I will quote the great Peter Drucker in The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done and say “I have never encountered an executive who remains effective while tackling more than two tasks at a time”. If Drucker wrote what is considered the bible for executive productivity back in 1967, how did the myth of multi-tasking persist for so many years?