The Great Multitasking Hoax

Originally Posted by Jouvan Johnson

Multitasking has become so mainstream that everyone thinks it's something that they should be able to do and do it often in fact there is more than 8.6 million web pages teaching how to "multitask"



Don't fall for the hype and BS, stop snorting the multitasking drug. It's a myth that only leads to failure

Steve Uzzell once said - "Multitasking is merely the opportunity to screw up more than one thing at a time"

And it's true ever feel like you've worked your ass off all day but yet you got nothing done?

Yeah me too and chances are you thought you were doing the smart thing by multitasking when actually you were royally screwing up your productivity.

Let me give you a quick history lesson...

The concept of humans doing more than one thing at a time has been studied since the 1920's but the term "multitasking" didn't come about until the 60's. Back then it was used to describe computers (not people).

The speed of computers seemed so fast that they needed a whole new word to describe it's ability to quickly perform many tasks. In hindsight they made a mistake using the word multitasking.

Multitasking is about multiple tasks alternately sharing one resource, the central processing unit or CPU for short but in time the context got skewed and became known to mean multiple tasks being done at the same time by one person or resource.

After all computers can only read one line of code at a time so when they "multitask" they switch back and forth, alternating it's attention until both tasks are done.

It just does it at such a fast speed that it gives the illusion it was done all at the same time..

So if a computer can't even multitask what the fly frog shyt makes you think you can?...

OK OK I can already here some smart arse getting excitable ready to state...

"I can walk and talk at the same time, or listen to music and work out at the same time, what about that Jouvan?"

Yeah I get it Dick (a name for my fictitious smart ass)

But I am talking about focused work that takes mind power. You can't perform an effective sales call while writing a great blog post now can you?

You can give it a go but I know without a shadow of a doubt they will both be a load of crap they won't even be good enough to fertilise soil. The more things you split your focus between the lesser the quality of work you are putting out.

Instead create time blocks for focused work and give all your brain power to that one task before moving on to the next. You will find that you will get much more done in a shorter space of time and the quality of your work will increase.

Stop chasing two hares, because we all know you will come home with non.

Jouvan Johnson
The IM Anarchist