Why multitasking kills remote working and what to do about it
Where was I? This is the question that many of us ask ourselves after being distracted (again) from the task at hand. And this moment of puzzlement strikes more and more frequently in remote working, where it seems that the deluge of information that we usually exchange at work has become suddenly unbearable. This situation is as common as unhealthy, besides being a serious menace to productivity.
If you feel like putting a stop at the too many distractions, interruptions, and sudden urgent matters that shrink your productive time, aim to kill any aspiration to multitasking.
Multitasking, the skill to do more things simultaneously, is a myth. According to an article that appeared in the New York Times, written by David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah, a tiny percentage of people can cope with multitasking. This small percentage of “supertaskers” is not affected by frequently changing the subject of their attention.
Too bad the most significant percentage of remote workers is not among them and hate multitasking as much as distractions, which force to repeat again and again the same process of focusing on the task at hand.
In remote working, this is such an (almost) given practice that we forget that multitasking is a bad habit that we contracted at the office. Yes, the distractions that we get in remote working are the very same that challenged us away from home, with the only fundamental difference that at the office these were mostly absorbed through informal exchanges of information, while at home — or remotely — they can’t: everything must be communicated through formal channels, be they messengers of some sort, emails, phone calls or virtual meetings.
This is what nowadays is known as information fatigue or infobesity. The good news is that this fatigue being a heritage from (bad) working at the office, in remote working, has no reason to persist. But it does, because bad habits don’t go away so quickly. Here are a couple of examples of how bad is this habit.
According to a study from Greenworking, people working in an open space get distracted 140–150 times a day. This is not exactly an indicator of good productivity, nonetheless, it is generally conceded that it is the flip side of good and constant information exchange.
What very few take into consideration is that each time we get distracted, we spend time in the distraction and commuting back to focus on the work at hand. This amount of time can vary from few minutes up to a whopping 23 minutes, according to Gloria Mark, whose peculiar work has been studying “distractions” at the University of California.
In 2019, according to The Radicati Group, the number of exchanged emails for work averaged at 126 per day for each of us. And if you are like me, you may have noticed that this number has grown in the last couple of years.
Now, indeed some people are good at multitasking, but these are the people who also have a minimal attention span, as they welcome every single distraction with a generous amount of brainpower. On the contrary, “light multitaskers” can focus and pay 100% attention to the current task (and obviously hate being distracted).
I don’t know about you, but if I were a manager, I’d prefer “singletaskers” who put all their attention into their tasks, one by one. Too bad managers often lament remote working, especially at home, being unproductive for the number of distractions away from the office. The situation is quite the opposite. It is the office’s distractions that become unbearable while serious singletaskers are trying to do their job.
To ease your life as a productive singletasker, you need to protect your time as much as you can. Talk to your manager and make him agree to an email and other possible forms of communications checking schedule. Shut off notifications from all those Slack, Teams, Skype, and Whatsapp rings. Ease the passage from one task to another with some moments of head clearing, have a stroll, go to the kitchen or to the garden, or change chair and wall to look at.
Protecting your productive time is the best way to show your boss that being present at work doesn’t imply being physically there.
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Author and journalist for many decades, Nick Gandolfi thrives in the complex world of digital and content marketing where he curates the many contents and digital services which float on the web. A storyteller at heart, Nick Gandolfi published comics, kid tales, mystery novels, tech, history, and educational articles (few e-books too). Nick Gandolfi firmly believes that all stories are important because they go to the heart of things and people.
