We are a society of multi-taskers.
Just yesterday I witnessed a woman choosing
groceries through several isles in the grocery store, while carrying on what
appeared to be a very serious conversation on her cell phone. As I finished my
shopping and moved to the checkout lane, there she was again, emptying her cart
while continuing the sometimes very animated cell phone conversation. Finally,
the checkout staff had to interrupt her conversation to ask her to pay for her
purchases. Although the store employee was very nice about it, the customer was
clearly offended about being interrupted.
As I was watching this play out, I thought, “Wow.
When did this behavior (on the customer’s part) become acceptable in our
society?”
Contrary to popular belief, multi-tasking is not
a new behavior. People have always been able to multi-task when it comes to
running a household and caring for children or others in the home. No one
thought anything of it until women began trying to “have it all” by building a
successful career while balancing home life.
When cooking a meal, sometimes I have active
pans on all my stove burners while I’m cutting an ingredient on the side. My
goal in this case is to have everything finish at about the same time, somewhat
like a project manager who schedules tasks to complete simultaneously so the
next phase of the project can begin.
As business leaders and employees, we multi-task
on a daily and sometimes hourly basis; this is just the way it is. Think about
the job descriptions you have seen lately – they all include the ability to
multi-task and prioritize responsibilities.
Don’t get me wrong; I don’t have any problem or
issue with multi-tasking. Some who know me would dub me the Queen of
Multi-Tasking. As you can see from the photo here, I also have phone
conversations while attending a Major League Baseball game. Trust me, I am not
the only one doing this.
What bothers me, though, is the rudeness of some
multi-tasking situations, such as the grocery story example I mentioned above.
If the phone conversation was so important, why
did the customer not stop what she was doing and give her undivided attention
to the call, and then continue on with her shopping?
Why did she feel the need to continue the
shopping process while sharing her one-sided version of the conversation with
those around her, and then berate the store employee for doing his job by politely
asking the customer to pay for her purchases?
This analogy can also mirror workplace
multi-tasking situations.
Think about it.
How many times have you held a conversation with
someone while you were answering an email to someone else, or talking on the
phone while writing a report?
The rudeness of that aside, how can you give
your undivided attention to two or more people or tasks at the time? You can’t.
Early in my career I was lucky enough to work for a supervisor who
stopped everything he was doing as soon as someone walked in his office door or
the phone rang. Granted, the person on the phone could not see that he wasn’t
multi-tasking, but while you were in his office, it was clearly obvious that
you – and you alone – had his completely undivided attention.
While I haven’t always lived up to his standards in that regard, the
picture in my mind is as clear today as it was in 1991. As an employee, his behavior
made me feel valued, and certain that my opinion or concern had merit.
23 years later, the difference between that leader’s conscious effort
to engage whomever he was speaking with and the grocery store customer provide
an excellent lesson on the merits of multi-tasking. While you can certainly do
more than one thing at a time, choosing to stop multi-tasking and focus on the
most important matter at hand for a short period of time is quite often the
better decision.
Editor’s Note: This post also appears on LinkedIn.
Before founding her own
consulting firm, Dawn Gannon served as a respected project management and
administrative operations professional in the military, higher education, and
healthcare fields for 25 years. As a Lean/Six Sigma Green Belt, Dawn’s
commitment and personal mission to improve the lives of others through service
to the community focuses on providing administrative and volunteer
management, consumer education, public outreach, event planning,
relationship-building efforts, and strategic planning. She is a contributor on LinkedIn, the author of the Management in Motion blog, and has written a number of articles
for RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association on the topic of childfree
living.
