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Our blog offers important resources, helpful articles, and practical ideas on the human resources topics that matter to you.
Our blog offers important resources, helpful articles, and practical ideas on the human resources topics that matter to you.
Home / Media / Blog / Rethinking Multitasking
Less Multi-Tasking… More Effectiveness
So, you’re hiring and seeing a slew of resumes from candidates who claim to be experts at multi-tasking. In interviews, they profess a great love of jumping from project to project, call to call, and back to the first project again, all while keeping everything straight and finishing every task in record time.
But… does effective multi-tasking really exist?
Do you need to rethink that “ability to multitask” off the job descriptions as a requirement?
Increasingly, we are seeing more information tell us that, for the majority of the population, multi-tasking may actually be bad for your brain (some articles and studies cited below). A many-tasked brain is a distracted one. While many people think they are excellent multitaskers, the amount of car accidents caused by texting and driving as well as potentially embarrassing occurrences of “reply all” emails that should have been directed to one person may prove otherwise.
I remember taking a commuter bus in downtown Los Angeles a few years ago and while looking down at the traffic below I caught sight of a young man in his car. He was attempting to drive while talking on his phone and trying to eat a steak dinner (with a steak knife) off of a plate he had balanced on his center console. I can only imagine how that ended for him. Best case scenario: he may have ended up with mashed potatoes on his tie. The bottom line is that he was trying to do three things at once and all of them probably poorly.
While the ability to manage priorities is a necessity, somewhere along the line an idea formed that everything had to happen at the same time. Some ways to help your employees avoid a multi-task meltdown?
Set Expectations from the Top Down.
And finally…
Click the link to view the recent INFINITI HR blog: What Not to Do When Dealing with Harassment Complaints or check back for more on human resources, payroll, insurance and benefits.
Additional Resources on the Topic:
“Why Single-Tasking Makes You Smarter” by Sandra Bond Chapman, PhD
“The Myth of Multitasking” by Nancy K. Napier, PhD
“The Limits of Multitasking” by Kevin Rafferty
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