If you’re anything like the rest of the world, you’re probably working more than one job, splitting your attention between several primary roles or functions.
It raises the question: how many hats can you wear and maintain at once? More importantly for your own health and success, as well as that of your employer or clients, how many should you be wearing at once?
If you can’t successfully manage them simultaneously, it’s time to consider reducing one of your commitments, either through time management planning (see our post here), or eliminating one or more commitments altogether. Otherwise, you end up the owner of a hat store, rather than getting what you need to done.
A few recommendations if you’re already juggling, or plan to juggle, multiple commitments:
- Delegate specific times of the day to individual commitments and if need be (or possible), communicate this to your colleagues, partners or clients (when appropriate), so that there’s no confusion and a proper expectation set with them, of your schedule and availability.
- Dovetailing into the previous point, it’s important to block out time for your own benefit too. Not doing so can result in too many opportunities for mistakes, both privately and publicly.
- Always proof your work at least twice and if you can, have at least one other person proof the work too before delivery. Proofing includes: spell check, grammar, dates, times, financial figures/calculations, and so forth.
- When emailing, avoid writing and sending in one session, try saving your draft and returning to it. Even if it must be sent immediately, save and close the draft out and then return to it. 9 times out 10 you’ll catch something you probably missed.
- Ask a colleague to proof you – haste makes waste.
Multi-tasking is a way of life these days; however, it is far less effective than you may think. Studies have shown it can be a considerable drain, switching from task to task, resulting in time, energy and financial loss to make the transition from one task to the next.
From the Stanford Report, August 24, 2009
Media multitaskers pay mental price, Stanford study shows:
People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found.
But after putting about 100 students through a series of three tests, the researchers realized those heavy media multitaskers are paying a big mental price.
“They’re suckers for irrelevancy,” said communication Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers whose findings are published in the Aug. 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Everything distracts them.”
Social scientists have long assumed that it’s impossible to process more than one string of information at a time. The brain just can’t do it. But many researchers have guessed that people who appear to multitask must have superb control over what they think about and what they pay attention to.
And as mentioned on Mashable yesterday:
It’s been said that multitasking makes you less productive, yet that hasn’t stopped the majority of U.S. smartphone users from juggling multiple devices. As many as 80% of people multitask on a mobile device while watching TV, finds a new study.
Mashable previously posted about this very topic back in August of this year. In their post “Why Multitasking May Make You Less Productive”, they go on to discuss the mechanics of multitasking:
Multitasking not only hinders productivity but it’s actually difficult to pull off. According to a March 30, 2011, article published in Psychology Today, multitasking (engaging in two tasks simultaneously) is only possible when two conditions are met: First, one of the tasks has to be so ingrained that no focus is necessary, and secondly, they involve different types of brain processing.
The same article goes on to offer some tips on how to manage this:
So what is to be done? Set ground rules. Establish boundaries. Throughout the day, consciously allocate set amounts of time (whether it’s 5 or 25 minutes) to allow your mind to smoothly and successfully focus and transition from one task to another. These periods should also include dedicated time where you can transition among social networks, news, emails and other forms of communication that require using the same part of your brain.
As usability experts, we often get to observe, in a lab environment, the strain users are under as they attempt to perform multiple tasks at once.
With our project management, focus groups and user experience practice, we help to eliminate much of the noise and drill down to what’s critical to successfully realizing your needs.
So if you haven’t yet done so, it’s time to put away a few of those extraneous hats or pass them on to someone with the time to wear them with the style and flare they so very badly deserve.