Reading Arguments

“In Defense of Multitasking,” David Silverman

READING

In Defense of Multitasking

DAVID SILVERMAN

David Silverman has worked in business and taught business writing. He is the author of Typo: The Last American Typesetter or How I Made and Lost Four Million Dollars (2007). He blogs for Harvard Business Review, where this essay appeared in 2010, ten days after the previous one by Peter Bregman. As you read, notice how Silverman attempts to refute Bregman’s position.

HBR.org blogger Peter Bregman recently made some excellent points about the downside of multitasking. I will not deny that single-minded devotion often produces high quality. Nor will I attempt to join the misguided (and scientifically discredited) many who say, “Yeah, other people can’t do it, but I’m super awesome at doing 10 things at once.”

But let’s remember, unitasking has a downside too — namely, what works for one person slows down others. Multitasking isn’t just an addiction for the short-attention-spanned among us; it’s crucial to survival in today’s workplace. To see why, take a look at computing, where the concept of multitasking came from.

Long ago, in the days of vacuum tubes and relays, computers worked in “batch” mode. Jobs were loaded from punched cards, and each job waited until the one before it was completed. This created serious problems. You didn’t know if your job had an error until it ran, which could be hours after you submitted it. You didn’t know if it would cause an infinite loop and block all the other jobs from starting. And any changes in external information that occurred during processing couldn’t be accounted for.

The invention of time-sharing resolved these issues: Multiple tasks can now be done concurrently, and you can interrupt a task in an emergency. Incoming missile? Stop the backup tape and send an alert to HQ. So, how does all that apply to the way people work? In several ways:

Multitasking helps us get and give critical information faster. You can get responses to questions quickly, even if the person you’re asking is on another task. For example: I was at an all-day off-site (no BlackBerrys allowed) when one of my direct reports received a request from an internal customer to make a slide. Since I was unreachable by phone when he started on it, my employee worked the entire afternoon on something that, after I finally read my e-mail and called him, took us only 30 minutes to do together because I had information he didn’t have.
Electronic Multitasking Is on the Rise

The percentage of youngsters who multitask while using electronic media—such as checking their Facebook page on their laptops while watching TV—has increased in recent years, but the percentage who multitask while reading has changed very little.

Percentage of 7th- to 12th-graders Who Multitask Most of the Time While:

Source: “Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8-to-18-Year-Old” (#8010), Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, January 2010.
It keeps others from being held up. If I don’t allow for distractions in an attempt to be more efficient, other people may be held up waiting for me. This is the classic batch job problem. Going back to my slide example: The next day, the person who had requested the slide said he only needed a couple of bullet points. Had he been reachable earlier, and not devoted to a single task and blocking all interruptions, we wouldn’t have wasted what ended up being nearly six hours of work time (my employee’s and mine).
It gives you something to turn to when you’re stuck. Sometimes it’s good to butt your head against a task that is challenging. And sometimes it’s good to walk away, do something else, and let your subconscious ponder the ponderable. When you return 25 minutes later, maybe you’ll reach a better solution than you would have if you’d just stuck it out. And in the meantime, you’ve finished some other task, such as writing a blog post. (By the way, my 10.6 minute attempt to uncover how many minutes it takes to get back to a task after an interruption yielded a variety of answers — 11, 25, 30 — and links to a lot of dubious research, such as this University of California study of 36 workers and this study that tracked “eleven experienced Microsoft Windows users [3 female].”)
The higher up you are in the organization, the more important multitasking is. The fewer things you have to do, the more you should concentrate on them. If I’m painting my house, and I’m on a ladder, I’ve got to keep on that one task. But if I’m the general contractor, I need to stay on top of the house painter, the carpenter, the electrician, and the guy swinging that big ball on the end of a giant chain, lest the wrong wall or an unsuspecting worker get demolished. To take this to the logical extreme: Does Barack Obama get to unitask? Can he say, “I’m not available for the rest of the day, because I’ll be working on that spreadsheet I’ve been trying to get done on the number of my Facebook friends who aren’t updating their pages with posts about their pet cats?” Or does he have to keep doing his job while handling whatever spilled milk (or, say, zillions of gallons of oil) comes his way?

What do you think? Are we comfortable pretending we really can live our lives not multitasking? Or are we like my father and others who say smoking is bad but can be found on the front porch in the dead of night, a small red glow at their lips, puffing away while texting their BFFs and playing Words with Friends?

Before you answer, think about the eight Washington Post reporters who tried to go a week without the Internet and failed miserably. The truth is, we need multitasking as much as we need air.