The Dilemma of Focus Vs. Multitasking

A young management professional reached out to me today with an oft-repeated dilemma – what to chose between Focusing on one thing and Multitask. A year out of the college now, she was taught at her management school that it is good to have the skill of ‘multitasking’. And now, the same is expected at her workplace too. Armed with this learning, she till now firmly believed in the concept of multitasking to excel at work and life alike. However, working for sometime now in the corporate world, she often finds herself caught in the predicament of focusing on one thing at a time vis-à-vis multitasking – that how working on many things simultaneously may also lead to distraction in focus from the most important thing at that time!

“Won’t it impact the quality of work, leave a piled-up list of unfinished tasks and finally diminish my productivity, which could have rather been augmented by focusing on doing one thing at a time?” she asked.

I am sure many of you would have faced the same dilemma, especially during starting years of your working life. And the question is quite valid too – this dilemma does exist. It would appear that in some cases, multitasking is undeniably an efficient way to utilize time, while on other occasions, the quality of the work may suffer as a result of split attention.

Few years ago, a teammate shared with me his success secret, with quite an apt description of FOCUS –

Follow One Challenge Until Success is achieved

I could not agree more!

And yet, on the other hand, multitasking is a really crucial & necessary skill demanded out of the working professionals in the chaos of today’s fast-paced scenario.

Here is what I learnt in all these years – these two are the two wheels of a bike. Both are quintessential and one cannot ride a bike on only one wheel. Given the situation, there is a reasonable dependency on both approaches and a balance needs to be achieved by ‘prioritizing’ the work.

I would like to share an invaluable lesson I learnt from an old supervisor – multitasking becomes difficult as we also confuse, a lot, between Urgent and Important – we often assume both to be same. Don’t you receive a lot of emails, with subject as Urgent and/or Important? However, in reality, not all work that is important will be urgent. Similarly, all urgent work may not be necessarily important; sometimes otherwise non-important work too requires urgent attention and action.

If we do not prioritize carefully, we can fall into this trap of

multitasking = distraction in our focus.

Then, there is more to it. Quite often, I have observed that we tend to take too much work on our plate – blame the old-fashioned fear of not being able to say ‘No’. That also leads to poor quality in the outcome, delay in timeslines and increased performance-related anxiety and/or stress. In this case, eventually, both work and the worker suffer. Hence, I would say that when you do decide to multitask, make sure to check your work carefully so as to ensure that it is of high quality, and consider abandoning multitasking for certain tasks if you notice a decline in quality. Saying a timely ‘no’ to a task you cannot do justice to is also a right start.

Again, there is an element of one’s engagement at work. As I keep saying, the real mantra behind a successful professional delivering quality output consistently is the quantum of her engagement at work. If she is working on the things that make her feeling productive and successful at the end of the day, she will be positively driven and encouraged to give her best in the same time duration and hence, this dilemma of focus vs. multitask will really not bother her way too much.

A successful professional will have a strong sense of planning her time and energy; she will focus on the high priority things at the time, while not losing sight of other simultaneous deliverables.

This is what I think and that’s how I manage the balance between focusing on priority and multitasking. Now, it is your turn. Let me know what you think. Do you too get embroiled in this dilemma? Do share your experiences.

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Photo-credit: rodneygoldston.com