Discussion on:

If you like to surf the net at the office, can you complain about your workload?

When one looks at the quality and quantity of work performed, it appears that most so called multitasking is really better described as "scattered attention" - people do a weak job of doing several things intersperced rather than doing a good job at one thing after another. That's OK when you are sort-of watching TV, playing a game which can be paused and resumed, answering an occasional text message, and eating some pop tarts. If your job similarly needs only superficial and intermittant attention to do well, that may work (say, a non-busy receptionist?).

But people don't truly watch you-tube videos and compose a well structured document at the same time. At the very best, they could interleave the two such that, say, 30 minutes of you tube watching and 30 minutes of actual document writing can be done in 60 minutes total but split into many smaller interleaved chunks rather than two big chunks - in which case they are still being non-productive on the job for 30 minutes of that hour, albeit in smaller chunks. It's going to be like the jest that many tiny slices of cake have fewer calories than a single big slice of the same size. They are still going to take longer to get the work done than if they were not interleaving, and/or do a sloppier job.

And this is the best end of the scale - more often the frequent "context switches" actually make them less efficient at both tasks, taking 75 total minutes to watch 30 minutes of you tube and to write a document which would have taken them 30 minutes if they focussed on it.

A friend is a college professor tells me that a majority of incoming students today are very poor at written communications, even compared to a decade ago. They may think they as inherently great multitaskers did their homework at the same time that they talked with friends and watched TV, but frequently they only "got by" without learning quality focus of attention, and it shows later in life. Grade inflation (and recalibrating things like SAT scores) has masked the effects of this.

There are jobs which inherently require good interleaving of tasks - for example frequent interruptions and switching attention among many uncompleted tasks. Doing one thing well and getting to a logical pausing point before changing tasks may just not be possible. The best folks in these tasks are still not putting 100% attention on several tasks at once, they are just efficient at dividing their time such that each task gets a fraction of their attention interleaved with other tasks. But even with these people, if some of those tasks were personal and not work related, they have diverted that fraction of their total attention away from getting their jobs done. If its a tiny fraction, then it has little impact; if it's a large fraction then they may be cheating their employer of their expected contributions just as surely as somebody who focused on their job for 5 hours before taking off the last 3 (but charging for 8) - the "multitasking" myth just allows them to pretend it isn't happening.

One important insight into this is that research is showing that even people who think they multitask well actually don't - and in fact, they often accomplish less while multitasking than people who do not self describe as being good at it. One hypothesis is that people who think they are good multitaskers are on average just better at ignoring the discomfort of not doing a good job - ie: being a self described good multitasker really just means they are more comfortable with / less stressed by multitasking because they can numb out to the negative consequences better.

So if you think you are a good multitasker, the chances are that you are actually below average at *successfully* multitasking. If you think you can spend a good portion of your day browsing the internet for personal subjects and still give your employer 8 hours (or nearly 8 hours) of real attention, then you are almost certainly fooling yourself, and trying to fool your colleagues - or you have a low value job which requires hardly any competence or attention to do successfully.

Another friend in internal tech support tells me that his experience is that many young workers think they are just naturally great with technology because they grew up with it, and indeed they are fine at setting up a VCR or light configuration of a cell phone (which got them a lot of praise as a genius from grandma) - but often their tech knowledge still superficial, and they are uninterested in learning anything which they cannot master in 15 minutes via graphical user interfaces intended to make it simple. Obviously this doesn't include everybody and there are plenty of very bright young folks too - but the generalization about younger folks being naturals with technology (or multitasking) may often be more of a "strong narrative" than a reality.

Likewise, next time you try to buy, say, an auto part from some clerk who is simultaneously chatting with a friend by cell phone, see if you think you are getting their full attention and are just as well serviced as if they had not been "multitasking". It just doesn't happen, and it's time to replace the myth of multitasking well (as if several things get full simultaneous attention), replacing it with the concept that interleaving of tasks almost always comes at significant cost, tho the extra waste is smaller for some people than others.

nt

I agree wholeheartedly! In fact, I'm going to copy and paste your post into a Word doc to give to my "multitasking" business partner. Thanks!

I am sorry if English is not my native language. I assume your arrogance comes from the fact that you can write on my native language without any mistakes?
Lastly, your attempt to support your point of view by insulting other people tells me how much your opinion is valuable. So long. I don't think I will be commenting on this article anymore since your kind of posts make it pointless.

n_egii@

You may not believe this, but English is not my native language either and I am not sorry for that.
However, I made the effort of learning the language to be more competent than the majority of English speakers.
Unfortunately, most immigrants simply can't be bothered to make this effort and then complain that they are being discriminated against.
It is just plain laziness that prevents people from learning the language of their host country properly.

so the point of your microtantrum is?

doesn't undermine his argument. We need you to give reason(s) why his argument is flawed.

Typos aside I completely agree that there are roles and tasks which can be effectively multi-tasked in the truest sense of the word. I certainly wouldn't ever consider flicking your concious thought between different 'threads' as multi-tasking though... As a software engineer some of my best work comes out of my sub-concious thought processes. Often the best thing for me to do is to stop focussing on a problem and tackle something else a bit less challenging (which can include a quick look at facebook or twitter). Suddenly 10 or 15 minutes later the solution to the difficult problem pops into my head. That's what I call multi-tasking.

Multi-tasking - in the computer world or human world - is defined as doing multiple things at the same time. Human beings DO NOT multitask. Yes, you can flip over to another task after working on something else, but that is task switching, not multitasking. The problem is that trying to flip between too many things fragments your attention to the point that you will do none of the tasks as well as if you had focused on one at a time.

I agree, there is no such thing as milti-tasking for humans. If you do another thing, you stop doing what you're doing previously. As an effect, you end up like you haven't done anything for the day.

Interesting you've documented part of what you were saying. However, your total message would have been more effective had you gone back to proofread and verify that what you wrote was what you meant, with complete sentences, words spelled correctly, no words left out--while you were multitasking. Composing on the fly works for some people, but reading your own work for content takes serious concentration. The next logical question is whether the source you cited actually said what you think or were you "multitasking" and only grabbed part of the meaning.

The way you've attempted to defend "multitasking" makes it read like wishful thinking.

The point of the original post is that the time used to surf the web & check face book updates is time taken from your job. Justifying this behavior by using the term "multitasking' is improper. Any time not focused on what you are paid to be doing is theft from your employer, and sometimes dangerous to passengers on mass transit systems.

What if someone is just a more productive worker than the next, but paid the same? For example, someone who handles 4x the service tickets of another person, all other things being equal (pay, quality of work, etc.). Does that give the more productive worker justification to goof off? I'm not saying yes or no, it's a serious question to ponder.

Perhaps the "more productive worker" got the job because they told their employer (resume, interview) that they were very 'efficient and focused'. Either way, I don't think being more productive ever gives you the right to 'goof off'.

If you had to go under the knife, would you be happy if your surgeon paused to check his twitter updates mid way through just because he's a "more productive worker"? (yes I know it's an extreme example)

Well... I guess it referred to web browsing in general.
It was on the Opera portal, I'll see if I can find it.
EDIT: found it: http://my.opera.com/portalnews/blog/2011/08/23/study-proves-web-surfing-increases-productivity-at-work
Not that I disagree with that post up above...

My quibble is with the idea that an employee doing something not focused on the job is theft. Employment is giving up pieces of your life in exchange for money; you may value your life more than your employer can pay and accept the pay to be able to support yourself and family. The idea that the employer "owns" all of your time while you are on the job is wrong. Most work is task oriented and there are breaks between tasks, so if the employee is doing the tasks given then there is no theft if the employee does something else between tasks. If an employee is not completing their tasks or not working at expected quality then that is a different problem that can be addressed by mentoring, reprimanding or firing the employee.

I tend to agree that with the advent of work-at-home environments the stark boundary between work and personal time has finally become so vague that it is probably no longer appropriate to even try to enforce the distinction notwithstanding a particular narrowly-defined job role. Given that in the early 20th century it was not uncommon for employees to presume a seven day work week and also prohibit employees from taking to one another during the (long) work day, this is come-uplands and some degree of justice for an ongoing underlying presumption that an employer owned you. The fact is that they do not and as at least one other post pointed out, if you meet your job goals,it is not your employers' place to dictate how you do it.

I work in an Engineering office here in Seattle and we have drafters who spend "hours" each day perusing the internet while they are supposed to be accomplishing their drafting. I sit on the other side of the wall each day as they discuss Craigslist ads, fishing sites, write personal emails, Facebook, etc... This all occurs while they have jobs with deadlines sitting on their desk. Walk on the other side of the wall (the drafters cubicles) and all of a sudden "Shazam" everyone is working full bore. Walk back to my desk and keyboard clicks stop and it's back to mouse clicks and occasional typing. Multi-tasking? Not! Wasting my time, the companies time, and the clients time when they don't help meet deadlines. I blame it on poor work ethic and the owners lack of enforcement of company policy. Oh wait, we don't have a written internet policy. Go figure.

are they meeting their deadlines or not?

Each drafter is utilized by more than one Engineer. When a drafter sits on a job and takes 8 hours to accomplish what should only take 4 hours they are affecting the company's bottom line as well as shifting drafting burden to the more productive drafter. I learned to draft so I could avoid missing deadlines and clean up their sloppy work. Milking a job is just one aspect of their "multi-tasking", having them accomplish the work as redlined for them is another because we constantly are handing them work that was not picked up on the first go around. So called "multi-taskers" who facebook, etc. are wasting company resources all the way around.

drafting retailers tend to not be spring chickens and they may know some things about the corporate culture that you do not, such as how much waste goes on far beyond their level of the org chart. Once you have been doing the job for 20 years then you can consider lecturing people about "work ethic" assuming you have not been outsourced or had your retirement money pirated.

I have been with this same company 22 years and know the culture and see the waste that the so called "multi-tasking" described above creates. When someone switches screens as you walk by to appear as if they are working hard on your project or when you pop your head up over the wall and see that they are placing a craigslist ad and at the end of the day they only accomplish four hours of real work but bill your client for 8, that's what I call a "poor work ethic". If I were the owner I would let go those individuals and hire someone who is willing to work for a full days pay and treat me and my clients fairly.

Here's a classic example: driving. There are a lot of things you have to be aware of and all of them contribute to your situational awareness and your ability to constantly adjust to the changing condition. But studies have shown that trying to drive while talking on a cell phone is the equivalent of drunk driving (University of Utah). The problem is that your brain simply CAN'T multitask well on two tasks, even when one of them "seems" to be trivial.

What women actually do better than men is task-switching - not true multitasking. It's exactly like what a CPU does in a computer - they task switch so fast that it _appears_ as if they are doing multiple things at once. In actuality, however, human studies have shown that people are incapable of concentrating on two things at the same time, and it requires concentration to perform most tasks at a quality level.

I knew there was a work for it better than multi-tasking. I'm great at task-switching, not multi-tasking. That's how I get so much work done, I can switch quickly between tasks to get more done. I still focus on one thing at a time. I was having a hard time describing this to my boss, and your analogy makes perfect sense.

"For example, you were doing multitasking while you were writing your comment..How is that not a multitasking? And it did not require you to put significant effort to do that."
All the "tasks" you describe were OPERATIONS dedicated to the TASK of writing the article. That is NOT what is meant by "multitasking." Cooking rice, sauteeing meat,and tossing a salad may seem like multitasking, but they all work toward the goal of "making dinner" and use several mental resources in common. To put it in computer terms, these programs are using a lot of shared files and are going to end up in the same document. Tossing a salad, reserving a hotel for the vacation you're planning in two weeks, and sorting the snail mail IS multitasking, because these tasks don't work toward the same goal and use very little "shared files."

This seems to propose we conform to that of a robot on an assembly line with only one pupose and one job and unable to divert from that task. You approach multitasking negatively when it has many benefits.

I under stand most people can't whisk an egg while flipping bacon at the same time. Multiasking is a state of mind as much as it is physicaly accomplishing more than one task at the same time. I can whisk an egg, turn around and flip the bacon and come back to the egg interleaving these tasks however my mind is simultaneously concentrating on both tasks not just one or the other, else I would only be whisking the egg and never think to flip the bacon. Sure neither task has my full attention but in the end I have completed both together and when the bacon is done the eggs are ready to dump on to the tastey bacon grease and scramble.

That all said multitasking is healthy. Diversions in the work place have proven to make workers happier, more productive, and happy to come back the next day. People sitting at their desk starring at the same screen all day are unhappy, bored, tend to work slower, and oft looking for another job.

juggling is multitasking too.
going to the bathroom is technically multitasking.
driving is multitasking. (which some fail at)
talking and walking is multitasking. (which some fail at)
soccer, football, and basketball are multitasking.

zhahai's point is spot on, our perceived ability to accomplish multiple things a one moment in time is extremely distorted.

to me. Taking breaks allows our brains to perform better.

My reading of the OP implies that "she" is spending way too much time 'multitasking'... while complaining about workload. While I agree that "Taking breaks allows our brains to perform better", a 'break' ceases to be a break when it takes up equal (or more) time as your paid employment, unless you are an elite athlete and put most of your effort into a 9.58 second 100m sprint!

The key thing to realize is that we have the ability to interleave and divide our attention, and that is sometimes extremely valuable - but we are still dividing out attention, not multiplying it.

If you are doing several tasks which have natural "pauses", like cooking, then you can potentially make use of that "dead time" for something else. For example, there's time between putting the egg in the griddle and the first need to flip it, and that time could be used to put bread in the toaster or unwrap the bacon, etc. This kind of interleaving of attention has two benefits: you get to make use of otherwise wasted time gaps when you would otherwise just be passively waiting for something to complete, and you can synchonize the results of several tasks so all of breakfast is done and hot at about the same time. One of the requirements is that each task have a low "context switching" cognitive overhead; for example, when you come back to the egg to flip it, you don't have to spend 5 minutes remembering all the context, you just look at the pan and immediately see if it's ready or not. This is successful interleaving of attention and is undisputed. (Notice however that if this cook is also trying to also respond to text messages, it's much more likely that things will burn - or at least take longer to complete).

There are other jobs which involve focused attention, and which do not have "wasted time" gaps, like creating or revising a complex document, or programming. These tasks tend to suffer from interleaved attention - if you are about to change some nuance of framing of a proposal, or you are considering the tradeoffs in changing the boundary cases of an algorithm, and you suddenly need (or choose) to deal with something else, there's a good chance you will need some time to re-immerse yourself in the complex project. If you switch frequently, this WILL eat into your productivity; if it's only occasionally the cost will be proportionately lower. The first point is that there IS a cost and it can vary.

Also read about the concept of "flow" as studied by psychologists. They can even measure brain waves to discover that for somebody focussed on a complex task, a one minute phone call may interrupt their forward progress for 15 minutes as it breaks the flow state.

By the way, it's also relatively easy to "multitask" tasks which are automatic, like eating or walking using many muscles in coordination, or to some degree driving. However, many studies have shown that cell phone use while driving leads to more accidents, due mainly to the cognitive load from communicating with somebody who is not adapting their behavior to the local context. That is, people may think they are giving 100% attention to the road and also attention to the call, but below their conscious awareness their reaction time and quick judgement skills are suffering (which they won't notice until a situation arises - or they take the wrong turn towards where they used to live).

All that said, of course all of us interleave our attention - it's more a matter of the size of the chunks, and also the degree of choice in timing of context switches (can you get to a "stopping place" before switching?). It's a good thing - in proper balance. They "multitasking myth" does not provide that balance, but instead promotes the idea that (self appointed) "good multi-taskers" are exempt from the tradeoffs involved, but they are not.

The second point was the myth that "a good multitasker" is multipying their attention rather than dividing it, and the implications of that for interleaving of non-work tasks with work tasks. If you were multiplying your attention by multitasking (as many people think they do), then you could give your employer (almost) 8 full hours of solid work, while also writing a novel and chatting with friends and solving sodoku - what a bargain! But you are not - even if you are super-efficient at task switching (or have a cognitivately simple job whose context switches are easy), you are at best just working a partial day which is unrecognized because the "not at work" times are small and distributed individually, even if they add up to a lot of time overall.

Another commenter notes that taking a short break from a difficult mental challenge (eg: 15 minutes on facebook) can sometimes prompt a small breakthrough and solution. I'm very familiar with that phenomenon and support that situation - tho a short walk might be just as effective and better for the health of a mostly chairbound worker. The question is whether this is used judiciously, or whether a once a week positive benefit justified 50 non-productive recreational breaks, or where one fits in between. Some breaks have been shown to be good, but more breaks (or task switches) are not automatically better.

The problem with internet browsing breaks is that they are mostly self-defined without good feedback or accountability. For somebody with a solid work ethic who will not abuse this, no problem. For somebody who would prefer to work as little as possible and browse/game/chat as much as they can get away with, it's unfortunately a real problem. I say unfortunately because I certainly don't like the idea of close monitoring or big penalties or an oppressive work environment - so some balance is needed.

And we can't get to that well considered balance until we dispose of the myth of multitasking, and replace it with understanding that interleaving attention means dividing attention, and that there is in addition some degree of additional lost time in context switching (which depends on the job and the person).

if multitasking was so rare we would not have computer interfaces designed with it in mind. True, that driving is a real-time extreme case where there is actual danger in not doing it well and most cases are not that extreme-but for the most part this is just about some bean counter
measuring someone else's efficiency when the existence of his own Job may be the biggest drag on the company bottom line as any.

A good example of multitasking is talking on the phone to a client and typing up a memo regarding something related to the conversation or entering order related information in a system or in a more ridiculous example sharpening a pencil while on the phone. This way you don't have to do it when the call is over.

In reality, you cannot do two things at the same time, those who might be able to pull it off are in carnivals on unicycles with items on fire.

those carnies..

Actually that is not a good example. Mentally that is one cognitive task. Different pieces of the whole, if you will.

The key here is "cognitive" task. That is a task that requires you to perform higher level brain functions like evaluate, plan, form solutions, make decisions, or have a conversation. These are very different from non-cognitive tasks such as walking, chewing gum, listening to the radio, or passively watching TV.

The human brain can only manage one cognitive task at a time. Don't believe it? Try simultaneously reading a book and holding a conversation with someone on a different topic. You can't do it. You have to switch back and forth between the two tasks, which means you're likely not doing either one of them very well.

I recently read another negative aspect of "multi-tasking" that makes a lot of sense. There is a roughly 25% penalty each time we switch tasks as the brain reorients itself from the old task to the new. An IT analogy would be something like flushing and reloading the cache. While I'm not sure of 25% figure (25% of what?), the penalty itself is obvious. When we switch tasks we have to think about what we have done so far, what is left to do, and what we need to do next. We do not have this penalty as long as we stay focused on the single task.

So what this means is people that "multi-task" by continually switching from one task to another are actually less efficient than someone who stays focused on a task to completion before moving on to the next one. This is all pretty obvious when you step back and objectively observe it.

Many people with ADD or ADHD have adapted well and are actually better multitaskers than the average citizen. My entire life has been fragmented, hyper-active attention regardless of the existence of all of these new distractions (Facebook, etc.). I've had my whole life to prepare and figure out how to beat deadlines with an adequate amount of quality control. I do high quality work, and others consider it that as well. I would say this reality also lends itself to better developed time management skills than your average person.

During college if I was writing a paper I would be the person spending 30 minutes on the web whilst still drafting the best essay the professor received. Your assertion that multitasking causes a lack of focus on high quality work to me seems heinous. When I write a formal business e-mail, I may draft it over the course of 45 minutes, but breaking up what I'm doing allows me to go back and read and catch any mistakes better than someone who just wrote straight through and then re-read all at once at the end (the whole "two eye balls is better than one" really applies to taking a break in between work, too). I see a lot of poorly written e-mails every day.

I'm not everyone, though I'd say you're generalizing a lot.

Maybe it's not that millennials can multi-task better, but rather that so many millennials also have ADD or ADHD.

As another person with ADD, I would tend to somewhat disagree with generalizing your point even tho I personally resonate with it. You may submit excellent essays while splittiing attention, but many people with ADD do not.

It's possible that you are exceptionally skilled and with your intelligence you would submit excellent essays even without distractions (perhaps even more excellent, that's the unknown). The question is - on average, do the ADD students in your class submit similarly impressive essays, or is the correlation more about your intelligence (perhaps despite rather than because of the ADD)?

You also mention developing, in compensation, better time management skills than most. Alas, I don't think that is characteristic of ADD in general - it may say more about your other character attributes than about ADD, just as some blind people make astounding compensations (and many do not).

In honestly I haven't read studies of whether people with ADD have been measured to have better attention interleaving skills as a whole. Perhaps so, perhaps not; I'm open minded about that.

But I know from experience that there are different flavors (not just degrees) of ADD/ADHD (some are excellent at hyperfocussing for extended periods under the right circumstances while others can rarely focus for long), and I suspect there may be different causes and consequences. I don't know any reason that genetic ADD would be higher in millennials, and I wonder if a type of induced neural patterning often lumped under the same ADD/ADHS label might not account for any increase. One might need to find some way (not easy) to unravel types of ADD before getting solid correlations.

The most we can hope for is to describe the general statistical pattern; hopefully we can each recognize and be open to individual exceptions.

not only that but I have actually being dinged for writing complete sentences when some management person went to a seminar on "business English" where they heard that sentence fragments and phrases with bullet points were more efficient. Bullcrap.

Me too! Sigh. I hate "business English" writing because it's dreadful writing.

I also despise that people expect me to write one line emails, so that thirty emails take half the day, rather than 1 good email that has a paragraph of information in it that takes 1 response in a half hour so I can get on with my day.

Your post is 100% accurate and IMHO significantly better (in both content, style and organization) than the original article.

nt

"She" may think she is being more efficient, but if you did some serious testing, you'll probably find she isn't.

It seems 'obvious' that if you measure the same person focused vs multi-tasking, then the focused activities would always win out.

But you don't really have control over that. Is her output (whether focused or not) better than the output from the other workers in the office? That's the only valid measure. worrying about -how- she gets the work done is the sign of a micro-manager.

If you want to see whether people can really multi-task, watch them when they are walking down the street. If they stop walking when they start talking, they can't multi-task. Many have trouble walking and talking at the same time. Drives me nuts when I'm walking behind these people and they suddenly just stop.

Others are fine with this, but get them walking down stairs and talking on the phone, and they start falling over. We all have a limit beyond which we have trouble.

Stopping is actually a body language showing that person is trying to emphases the importance of the message he/she is going to communicate. It is not the sign of a lack of multitasking skills.

... possibly not. It's definitely dependent upon the individual and the context.

Run down a set of stairs while eating.

I find I can walk down them while eating, but if I start to run, I start biting my tongue and the inside of my cheeks.

Hey Toni, another excuse:

She has to go to the bathroom less than her 50 year old boss, so she can have that extra time to keep sending fun emails.

As a remote network admin, the general day to day grind is simply not challenging enough. When the rare times come up which require my full undivided attention, it gets that and more. However, for the most part I am simply not challenged enough. Perhaps if I was not so good at my job more things would break requiring my 100% attention, but it seems things run so good the few things that do break are just so simple to correct that it takes nothing to get them operational again.
I was born in the mid 60's and for some reason I was blessed with the knack for computing, but as you can imagine it was not from the year of being born. I have had to dig in and bury myself in learning and when the time calls for it I still do. A very good portion of my self teaching was taking a dos manual (back when those were sent with computers) and reading it start to finish as if it was a great novel and performing each command in the manual with all the parameters until I was comfortable with each command. I have attempted to get others to learn this way and to date I have never found anyone who can do this, but I seemed to have what I call the eye of the tiger in determination to learn. Am I an expert? Heck no and not even close. There are many people who know so much more than I do and based on my current work I have to know a little about a lot and never specialized in any one technology which does make me good at what I do. However, in this economy I will say the act of finding work is the challenge as sales has never been a strong point for me. I have no desire to be anywhere I am not wanted, but when wanted I do go above the call of duty in every aspect of my support.
Being remote I am able to work on multiple things at any given time, and again when the task at hand calls for it (which seems rare) the task does get my 100% attention. There have been times in which a specific problem was bad and took several days to get operational in during those days I got very little sleep. The end result was the customer received no extra billing as they were on a verbal maintenance agreement and I simply covered it under that. Having an employee bring me the server to work on here along with taking the repaired server back helped as I generally try to bill extra for on-site visits, but I do have clients in which I have a building key and alarm code that does not get billed extra for on site.

If I was not so well rounded I agree my job would require my undivided attention as it did while I was learning so much, but for the most part I am able to coast through my work as it's very simple. Research is the majority of my time so when something comes up that I need help with a quick couple of correctly formatted searches results in exactly what is needed to correct the problem. For the more serious problems I have no problem giving it all I have as I am self employed so client satisfaction is the most important aspect. Keeping all systems operational is the goal.
Rob

I completely agree with the idea that sometimes multi tasking on non-work items is required to just stimulate the brain a bit! I DO have a full work load, and I DO spend time reading non-work sites (like TechRepublic) during the work day. My work, though I have a lot of it, is not mentally challenging, so I need something to prevent brain cell loss. Also, if I am running a report, waiting for data to compile, then I don't feel guilty for using that time to read a discussion board, newsletter, or Facebook - as soon as I get notice that the report is done, I pop back over to the work-related task. Frankly in a technology focused world, if you are not keeping up with technology, you are not completely doing your job anyway, so that sort of time should be factored into the work day.

so there are times my job is that of a remote network admin - running a report, test, etc. and I do read TechRepublic blogs (like right now) while I wait. Then there are times I'm doing hardware repair, or desktop support, so I'm away from my desk. I don't "feel" it's wrong to check TechRepublic or Facebook while I'm at my desk waiting for tests to end or things like that. Where I work, those who are older than me, talk to each other in their office suites in their down time, so they can't nag me if they catch me reading a tech article.

I hate the perspective from superiors that "You've always got something to do to keep your busy. If you're waiting for something to finish, do those other things while you're waiting". The truth is, if I'm installing an OS, it requires me to be semi-present through the entire install - yet at the same time, it only requires me to be there to hit the occasional "OK to reboot" or "remove the CD from the drive", before I wait for another 30 or 40 minutes of automated install. At least, traditionally that was how it worked. Things have changed a little since I was a forward engineer. But the basic concept is the same. IT forward engineers are frequently like pilots of a commercial airline. The plane is flying itself, we're there for those few instances where you need a human to make a decision, usually a "fuzzy" analog decision as opposed to a binary one. Although honestly, a lot of the fuzzy decisions are binary ones too ("click Yes/No to continue").
At any rate, as an IT engineer, I spend a lot of time waiting to click a button that then leads to more waiting. I might be able to manage having two or three of these kind of situations going side by side at the same time - which is awesome when it works out that way. But I generally *can't* be very effective at doing that while publishing documentation to the org intranet and crafting a change control submission for my next implementation project. If I start trying to multi-task all of those things, they tend to require me to be in physically different locations (building the servers often puts me in a lab or DC, doing docs or writing up change control puts me at my desk or in a lab working out the details, etc). A secure DC is going to have me locked down about what I can bring in and out - only the essential items (the servers, my documentation that relates to the server builds, and the disks or software that is necessary). So my laptop with all my vendor contacts so I can take care of getting vendor quotes for UPS systems isn't going to be something I can multi-task while I'm building servers out in the DC. Nope, I sit there, watching a blue screen with white text, filling out IPs and DNS and names and joining domains and hitting reboot, and mostly... WAITING...

In such a situation, yeah, I might bust out my smart-phone and check out Tech Republic, or The Chive or Cracked or Wired or Digg or something else that is a kind of diversion.

The kind of boss who claims, "You could be doing something useful. Organize the tapes, get those cables better managed"... they're missing how process oriented DC change is. I can't effectively just figure out something that "needs done" and do it in some passive, incidental way while I'm waiting for a machine to finish rebuilding. It is bad for whatever the "incidental job" is, and it is bad for the task that I truly have at hand.

To be honest - on some *real* stressful builds, I find that the best bet is to keep my focus 100% on the build, to make sure I don't hit a YES where a NO was appropriate, causing me to potentially blow out the whole build and start from scratch. Which should illustrate the point - sometimes, yeah, IT work is like hunting - you've just got to sit there, still, watching, waiting for that moment where you make either the right decision and finish up or the wrong decision and start over from scratch. Lots of people don't get this, and until you've done it for a living, it is hard to understand.

That MIGHT be one of the reasons why IT seems more suited to men then to women - at least, forward engineering. That singular HUNTER focus might be a critical skill, where "Gatherer-focused multi-tasking" ends up in sloppy, poorly built deployments. Not politically correct to say such things, but that doesn't mean they might not be true.

And the boss you mention is making a concerted effort to reduce your value. It's, unfortunately, the way companies want to view IT. You are effectively doing an assembly line, anybody can do it, or at least a whole lot of high school geeks can do it, job. You're not a real professional.

Obviously, with years and years in the business, that's not how I feel, but I've seen the attitude enough to know it's a very real thing.

And, unfortunately, IT hasn't helped themselves any with a history of being power hungry, unaccommodating jerks. (I'm speaking in generalities here.)

The two issues, if we're talking about the IT profession, are somewhat co-mingled. That's very different from a worker spending 4 hours a day on Facebook.

There are times when IT is like hunting in that sometimes we have to wait, be still, then make our move.

Then there are those times a job doesn't need our 100% attention and we can read a quick tech article or something else.

If you are getting your workload done, and reading TechRepublic blogs in the time gaps makes you a more skilled employee, then I don't see where you would be shorting your employer. Most employers accept that there also is some degree of natural "personal time" - getting a brief call from home, chatting with fellow employees, walking to the coffee machine, etc. If facebook usage is within those limits, it may be harmless. The key thing is to pay attention to whether the behavior is actually excessive and is being falsely justified - each of us can make that judgment call. So do our colleagues and bosses.

I have to wonder if her boss also sends her emails with work to do AFTER "quitting time." Indeed, in many industries, "quitting time" no longer exists. I'm in education. More than once I've been sent work to do over a holiday weekend by email. I routinely get emails from the school at 7-9 pm with work to be done by the next day or the day after. I spent an entire Christmas eve and Christmas day once completing a program review collaborating online with the other instructor in our department because the dean said it had to be done by the start of spring semester right after New Years.

Now, we don't have any rules about not surfing the web during office hours or checking email while waiting for students to arrive in class. However, if they did claiming we were "stealing" time from the school district, we would probably laugh out loud considering how much time they "steal" from our family time or personal time after we go home.

Considering how much work professionals today do "after hours" it is laughable that Businesses still think about 9-5 as "their" time when they are also claiming the rest of the day too.

Oh, BTW, I'm not a millenial. I'm 60 years old, but I know that in the modern workplace, the lines have been blurred by both employees and employers between worktime and offtime.

As an ex-teacher I agree with your statement that the school systems place expectations that are not like corporations I've worked for. Working at night after work is pretty much expected because any planning period you might have is frequently consumed with other tasks...there's simply not enough time in that day and so you checking email, etc between classes...hey no biggie. As for the folks who are in corporate America though, they do own you from 8-5. Virtually every IT job I've had, engineers leave early, come in late, work from home (yeah, right!) and then they say that task they had last night or over the weekend...wow...it was a marathon so I need a comp day. BS. It's your job. Shut up and do it. Check your personal email, news sites, and FB after work. You're not paid to see what your cousin is doing on their vacation you lazy....

I cannot tell you how often I feel that I get more done before the office opens or after the office closes than I ever get accomplished during the actual business day. I have a set of tasks that need to be accomplished and I get into the "mind set" of accomplishing those tasks. Generally I can move to a different task while waiting on the "progress bars" of another.
But observing many of my co-workers you would think they are all insane. Always with their e-mail open, text messages, instant messages, phone calls about subjects that should have been brought up during the meeting etc. etc. etc. Literally dashing around like a chicken with the preverbal "head cut off" They all seem exceptionally gifted at "looking busy??? But really... how much do they actually get accomplished in the day? I too often wonder as my day grinds to a halt as soon as the office opens up and I start fielding micro meetings, calls, messages, that are all "terribly urgent" ... to them. My entire Corp. could benefit from time management courses??? But generally, that all falls on deaf ears from the litany of sales staffers that insist that their e-mail is too important to let it go unmonitored, even for 30 minutes so they can concentrate on writing a good proposal???
No doubt that the company I work for has issues. But for many businesses, I suspect, things like this will never change as long as the upper management suffers from the same time management difficulties as the rest.

Must work in the same place as I ?
I see the same issues not only in the company I currently work for but many other places these days.
Way too many distractions. I work on extensive projects, many require a lot of thought.
I will create an appointment in my calendar for specific times of project work, close down e-mails, and forward my phone to v-mail during those times. If some interruption occurs, I simply reschedule the time and forward to my boss the new slipped project deadline date.
I never do IM, Although the company has it's own setup. I tried once and thought I would just not be on-line when not wanting to but everyone would expect me to be so I never install the app anymore, Great for customer service work but not in my job, want to tell me something can't wait, call me or must not be important!.
Once time I argued the reasons on one boss's deaft ears, said I was not reachable enough, expected e-mails to be rel;ied to within 5 minutes, and should always be at my phone and answer.
I finally gave in, when approached a week later why a project was not getting more time, I showed where I was either having to be on the phone, answer IM or e-mails constantly and since that was a priority now was not getting much time in between to work on the project, Never heard him complain again.

huh!! I agree with what word you have for your co worker.Test her efficiency by allocating some hard task .

I'll keep this short- a worker that is surfing the 'net, checking personal bank accounts, checking Facebook, etc., on company time is stealing from the company, short and simple. If you are on the clock, you should be working, and saving the personal stuff for your personal computer at home.
Any good supervisor would take action and issue at least a warning to this person if it came to the super's attention, particularly if the evidence is available in the form of temp internet files, browsing history, etc.
I just don't get where this behavior is legitimized by terming it "multitasking".

Spoken like a true middle-managment non-thinker. By the way, thanks for "laying me off" after I was doing your job and mine producing results while you were micro-managing the department.

The true theft happens at the top of the company. A company hires a CEO for a certain amount of money with stock options for performance or just to get this talent on board; if the CEO performs badly and causes the company to lose stock value then the CEO gets a golden parachute to keep performing badly.

An employee can do his job great but get laid off because of a decision made by the CEO and the employee gets the lead handshake.

If the hiring manager hires a new employee and allows the employee to perform poorly for a long time then it is the hiring manager who is wasting company money on low performance. A non productive employee should be mentored to improve and if improvement doesn't happen then the employee should be let go.

Good point. It's never professional to complain about our workload. If we have a problem with it we should talk to our boss, not others.

I did, and now I feel terrible.

How many of you are reading this & other Tech Republic stuff while at work? Oh right, since you work in IT, that makes it 'work' not personal. Just a friendly jab...I do it too!

I still have 30 mins b4 I jump in the car. I dont check my personal email at work anymore...will admit that I used to though.

The question I have is does she finish her job every day? If she does then there is nothing wrong with it and she could just bored. Those of us born in the age of computers get bored if we are not working filling in the entire day and companies have to realize that

Comparing her surfing the net to the boss checking his watch? Does it take the boss an hour out of his day to see the time?

In my neck of the woods we call that lady something called LAZY. Your job is not to surf the Internet and if she's too stupid to differentiate between work and personal time, she should not be in a technical role in the first place!!! I'd write her up and eventually she'd be fired.

Time to raise your game Toni. Zhahai's comment was better than the original article! (although I liked that too)

I (male) consistently have multiple activities going on and they all should be work related. (Our company actually monitors for excessive surfing activity; especially streaming.) Take two people who multi-task equally; one is all work and the 2nd person half work and half other stuff. The first should be twice as productive. However, there is a need to periodically tear away from work and clear the mind. It could be argued surfing a few fun sites accomplishes this (e.g. providing commentary to TechRepublic). Perception is a big factor so I would suggest some discrete and limited surfing or get up and take a walk to the water cooler... wait that would be perceived as a person always hanging around and BS'ing with people. Never mind just get back to work.

The fact that women, or anyone, can multi task is an urban legend that continues to persist. Research shows that about 1 in 40 can multi, or "super" task, and the rest of us are not able to do it well. Man, woman, makes no difference. So though some posters might have anecdotal evidence that it can be done, it is likely not true in general.

Please provide references for those of us who are interested. Thanks.

Before I retired, my work pace could vary from day to day, and even within the day. There were times when there wasn't enough time to do the work available, and I would feel compelled to stay over 1 to 1 1/2 hours to complete the day's caseload. During slow times of the year, and at certain work loacations, there were blocks of time with no work-related activity on the docket. I felt that taking time to check e-mail during those times was NOT taking time away from work. If I wanted to rationalize, I could even say that this compensated me for the extra time I put in during the busier times, at no extra pay, but I don't want to go there. That was part of my job, as contracted for. But I did not feel as if I was short-changing the employer if there was time where I truly had no work to do, and I chose to catch up on e-mail rather than sitting around and doing nothing.

I do a very technical support job. Sometimes I goof off for a minute or two and check a website. I do something mindless. While that is happening my subconscious is still working on the problem or issue or task at hand.
I come back to the task refreshed and often with more input or insight.
I can't remember when i last worked a 38 hour week, which is what I get paid for, total hours at work and taking problems home is much more than that. So I goof off in company time, but I think that overall they are the winner.

Do you honestly think that many, if any, people would be reading your articles if they were not viewing these in company time...

Women are not better at multi-tasking than men. What women are very good at is time-slicing and quickly assessing compatible work practices that lead to time efficiency.

This is a skill learned by mothers. Someone should study this and also see if the effect is the same on single or main carer fathers. Please prove/disprove my hypothesis that this skill is learned rather than inherent to a gender.

It doesn't apply to checking social media etc. Even work email is a distraction to tasks that require concentration. I can listen to music, even sing along, while driving. I cannot listen to language tapes (I tried and nearly ran into the back of someone).

So unless the millenium person can treat facebook etc with the same disengagement as singing along while driving, then they are slacking.

My blood pressure elevates when I hear that term---yet one more contribution to the modern lexicon via computers that is absolute nonsense when it's applied to non-digital humans. It is physically impossible to do two seperate physical tasks at once. In the example cited, you might be using an IM client whilst a document is open, but there is no possibilty of using I'M *and* writing a document simultaneously. If you mean the ability of some persons to juggle multiple assignments, that's a different story.
But then some wag will ask if I have the bandwidth to time-share, and I'll have to start practising my relaxation techniques, so I won't bring that up.

While people can mutli-task, it is always quicker to do separate tasks one at a time. The focus that is given to individual tasks allows them to be accomplished more quickly. Many so-called "excellent multi-taskers" claim that this isn't true, but that is because the end result of their multi-tasking is that their work is of lower quality than it would be if they devoted time to the tasks individually.

The demands that are placed on most of us at work these days don't always allow the luxury of not having to deal with incoming calls or urgent emails while working on something else, so it is good to try to develop some sense of being able to juggle multiple tasks at once. Just don't ever fool yourself into thinking that the end result is of the same quality or that you are accomplishing your tasks more quickly.

A little distraction at work, ala facebook or surfing the web, while subtracting from actual work hours completed, can be beneficial since it provides a mental break than can allow us to return to a task somewhat refreshed. It shouldn't be confused with multi-tasking though.

I agree it would be nice if one could finish one task before starting another, but many of us do not have jobs that allow that. We must answer inquiries, answer the phone, or handle whatever urgent item comes up. "Multitasking" is not optional for many of us. It is required.

If you hire a person to do job X and you see them doing job X but also Y and Z. Wouldn't that upset you that you are basically paying them and with multi tasking there is the chance that Job X will now take longer since it is time sharing with other tasks?
I have found my self making more errors and putting out a lower quality of work when multitasking. I find if i work on one item (and that one item may be multi tasked but is all related to the same task, So yes multitasking has it place) my work is better. But if i multitask across unrelated items, then i find my self backtracking a bit to find where i left off between the tasks.(And Yes I am handed multiple tasks from different groups, all expected to be done simultaneously)

I hope that makes sense.

I can sleep and snore at the same time (according to my wife), but I cannot sleep and drive at the same time (according to the police). I suspect that the most proficient mult-tasker cannot do some things well at the same time.

If humans could really multitask, why then does auto accident research show that texting and driving is as bad as driving drunk? I would argue that if people could really multitask then these statistics would show a different result.

That said, I think the ultimate problem with the millennials are that they were born out of a culture where you get a trophy for just showing up to the sporting events. Where every Boy/Girl Scout gets an achievement badge. This mentality does not teach these younger workers how to deal with adversity or failure. Rather it teaches that they should be rewarded for just showing up. The work part then becomes an annoyance and interferes with their own personal agenda.

We've taught a generation of young folks that you don't need to work hard, you just need to show up and that is what is really wrong with this country and why we're falling behind in the world.

I know you need "filler" articles occasionally but this wasnt worth the time it took write it. Toni Bowers, the award-winning writer and Head Blogs Editor for TechRepublic would have made better use of her time surfing the internet. Pick up the pace TechRepublic and dont send me filler crap just so you have a newsletter to push to my email box.

Your filler crap reply wasted more of my time with worthless info then her whole article. If you didn't want to read it then you should have just passed it by but it must have been important enough to complain about it that you took the time to write this LOL!!! Oh how I love people :P

Very interesting discussion, and not one psychologist in the bunch.

A couple of years ago, a psychologist friend of mine (Ph.D., researcher) laughingly told me that "this multi-tasking thing is all a myth." She said quite simply a person cannot truly multi-task. Nevertheless, the debate rages on.

I think the book is still open on the subject, but what I find most interesting is that the notion has become part of the lexicon with the advent of the digitized work place and women entering that same work place in record numbers.

Women have always been thought of as multi-taskers: taking care of the baby while fixing a meal and carrying on a conversation.

But men certainly multi-task as well, as any number have proven when driving a manual transmission car.

How well one performs, however, and exactly what one owes his/her employer are different questions.

Many employers still operate under the notion that they should only pay employees enough to keep them from quitting because employees inevitably only work hard enough to keep from being fired.

If one person delivers in due time the job she has to do with the correct results, where is the problem on she doing something else during this time? On the other hand if the job is poorly done or consistently released late, then it has to be pointed to this person and if required go for more drastic decisions. In case the colleagues, bosses or other coworkers are annoyed by being spamed with jokes, emails or youtube videos, they can tell it to the person annoying them. I don't think we need to make general cases of this, just treat them following the pure results. If you allocate job positions for something that can be done in less time that a company is paying for, it means this task is not being properly managed. I do agree that some young persons mix the mastering of technology with the familiarity of usage. Once again assigning properly tasks to them and evaluating them at the right moment will put them back on track. Believe me it works, I experienced it myself in previous positions.