Multitasking: A Recipe for Procrastination

I'm pretty sure it's fair to say that everyone tries to multitask with at least one thing during their day. Ranging from things like talking on msn while checking your email, or eating while you're reading the paper, etc. In all, multitasking has become pretty integrated with our daily lives. In fact, multitasking has become so crucial to our well-being that it's a trait that's sought after by companies looking to hire new workers. This is especially apparent in office administration jobs where a qualification is 'the ability to handle various tasks at hand'. In this way society has been ingrained with learning how to handle this balancing act efficiently.

Now is it me or is this all backwards? Whenever something needs to be done, it's been said over and over again that you should focus on the task at hand. Now it becomes obvious that some smaller menial tasks or things that don't need much focus when in the MT (multitask) mix. Ie: eating food, watching TV, etc. But even that, I still contend that certain small things are lost when done in a MT setting.

Take eating food: when you sit down to eat dinner in front of a TV, do you get up to wash the dishes the second you finish the last bite? No way! Most likely, you get caught up in whatever you're watching on TV that you will wait until the next commercial break at least before you do anything about the dishes. If you're like me, you might even wait till the end of the episode or end of the hour before the clean up starts to happen. If this is the case, is it not taking you longer to eat that same meal you could have eaten in 10 minutes? And that's not even including how big of a pain dishes become once things dry up and get caked onto the dishes.

There are even more things with our one example that change once put into the multitasking routine. If you're reading a newspaper while you eat, you're practically shut out from the world around you since it takes concentration to read. Usual conversations that you could be having with people around a dinner table (like your parents) is definitely foregone. And even the smallest pleasures about eating become absent, like enjoying the taste of your food. Sure things still taste good while you're doing something else, but are you really taking the time to fully enjoy the taste of the food? Not to mention that some people forget to chew their food when they become distracted.

I could go on and on with the examples where multitasking really fails us, but that blog would go on forever and would cause more people to multitask since it takes so long to read. So I'll put some of my prime examples in point form:

- the treadmill/elliptical in front of the TV: how many people actually end up getting on that thing vs. just turning on the TV and heading straight for the couch. It works for some people, but it makes you wonder what intensity the TV takes away from the workout.

- doing homework while on the computer: I think any honest student knows that this approach tends to screw you for tests more than it does prepare you.

- driving while texting: I'll admit, I'm absolutely terrible for this. And for everyone who does it, there is no way that you can say with a straight face that it doesn't effect the quality of your driving.

My point is that I've had quite the epitome if you will about the whole process and how much it impacts my life personally. For anyone who knows me, dishes that are constantly left in the basement, things seem to always be a mess down there, and I'm constantly telling myself and everyone else about how I would like to take the time to do this or that. I've made the realization that multitasking has caused me to procrastinate my life away. Even today when I told myself that I would work out during the day, I kept on thinking about what kind of TV show I'd like to watch while working out. Because of this, I started to plan out the timing of my work out to coincide with a good TV show, pushing my workout further and further back. I didn't actually get to working out during the program but instead it happened when I finally decided to devote time to working out and focusing on nothing else.

The world has become so driven and sped up that some people feel like they can't escape multitasking. I don't deny that it's a highly productive way to get things done, but the question is at what cost? Some of the most disciplined and respectable people that I know don't MT. I think the whole process has numbed our perception of commitment to tasks and has gotten us accepting mediocre results for everything we do. We fail to stop and enjoy the small things in life.

In a world filled with multitasking, parents still wonder why their kids can't focus in class.