Being Famous For Multitasking May Be A Woman’s Curse
 
 
OK, so we can run on a treadmill, while reading our email . . . and talk on the phone at the same time. And if we see someone—at the edge of our peripheral vision—about to do something dangerous, we can take action. Somehow women evolved with a heightened ability to juggle attention. Personally, I think it was the pressing need on the Pleistocene plain to gather food and children at the same time.
 
As Martha Stewart would say, “Is this a Good Thing?”  My answer is, “Not always.”  The American Psychological Association reports that new studies reveal the hidden costs of multitasking. There is a time loss when switching from one task to another, and the amount of time increases with the complexity of the task. If one of those tasks is fairly new, your time loss is much greater when you’re multitasking.
 
Not to be too nerdy here, your Brain CEO has executive control processes that come into play for each task. It has to allocate resources, such as brain cells, and setup priorities. For each aspect of your performance—perceiving, thinking, and acting—you have mental software that must come into supervised play. Wonder why you’re tired at night?
 
Now here’s where the curse part comes in. If you interrupt a man who is doing a task, oh, let’s say reading a budget report, adjusting a gasket, operating the remote control, he’s going to look up very briefly with a pained expression and say, “Can’t you see I’m busy?”  Women, that’s what we should do more often. Instead, you know what we do. We try to juggle one more thing, because of that Pleistocene background.
 
In the workplace, this often pulls us down. We end up splitting our attention between many tasks. We end up being the ones the boss imposes on with Just One More Thing. And we take it with the silent promise, “Just This One Time.” The scientific study shows us we’re losing time—although maybe not as much time as a man would lose—because refocusing is harder and he has to talk about how hard that is. Sorry guys, that’s true.
 
In the workplace, we’re being pulled down with some time loss and pulled down with the piling on of extra tasks. But the most important thing is we’re not being pushed up with focused attention on one big task that merits us high visibility. Who has time for that? A man with a closed door.
 
Tip:
Copy the boys on this one!
 
 
Further Reading: 
 
Website, American Psychological Association, Is Multitasking More Efficient?  
 
Website, WomensMedia, Concentration: Getting Into Flow
 
Blog, Creating Passionate Users, Your Brain on Multitasking

Blog, FastCompany, by Margaret Heffernan, Stop Multitasking
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Tags: business, women, multitasking, working, business, women,