The Downside of 'Hypertasking'

Combuchan writes "An interesting article from AZ Central expounds upon the downside of 'hypertasking,' doing far too much at once, such as talking on the phone while doing office work at the Starbuck's has a whole host of negative side effects: irritability, impatience, sleeplessness, an overly extended workweek, and is largely unproductive. With wi-fi hotspots popping up everywhere and computing power shrinking, are we all doomed? Or, as the article indicates, it's possibily evolution of the mind at work."

Comments

IMHO

[perlchild]

Maybe it just means we have lots of power to do things differently, and manage time effectively, but we never learned how.

Just because we can work at the Starbucks doesn't necessarily mean we should, but on the other hand, because we can, we can pick it as a regular place of work, and decide save an employer some dollars in office space, increasing our employee value.

There are lots of new disruptive technologies out there that can benefit both employers and employees, but only if the employees embrace them, as ways to get themselves more flexibility and other advantages. That means good things, provided we're all willing to become entrepreneurs of a sort, last I checked it was a minority that was ok with being responsible of all their own work conditions. (Lots of people are ok with being responsible for the benefits, but not of the tradeoffs.)

The proportion of it going on is however, likely to increase. The biggest problem we are facing will be effective management of people, we have effective clone management down to an art, and effective management of sheep too, but much more rarely of individuals. A good place to study this, for the researchers reading, would be to poll those successful game company managers, finding out how those who not only make games that rock the players, but mostly, finding the rare few, who make games on time, by feeding and stroking the egos of designers and creators, to get them to overaccomplish themselves instead of being at cross-purposes.

Info Overload

[MadMacSkillz]

Reminds me of the last school I worked at (as Network Admin.) Various support departments were e-mailing teachers a kabillion times a week, and as a result the teachers stopped reading the e-mails - there were too many. I told each department, "Hey, why don't we set up a web page, and each of you can have one paragraph on it. Then we just tell the teachers to check the web page once a day!" They would not consent to it - they said they had "too much information to share." When I pointed out that no one was reading their e-mails anyway at this point in time, they just looked at me. I'm pretty sure they were thinking "Don't confuse us with the facts!"

Re:The trick is to make technology your slave

[bconway]

I personally don't get that many e-mails at work but i've heard the Finance director saying he gets 400 e-mails a week. I fail to accept that reading all these e-mail is a productive use of his time and companies ran just fine before e-mail. Only uses the technology if it helps you work more efficiently.

Are you kidding? Have you ever done a paper-to-paperless conversion project of any sort? How long do you think it would take for the finance director to get the same things done if each of those 400 emails was someone knocking on his door or sending a letter from outside the company? Would that be a more productive use of his time? Every conversion project I've been involved in has led to at least 4x the productivity, that certainly sounds like technology making things move more efficiently.

We Have The Option of Steping Back?

[EXTomar]

This may sound like an odd thing to say but realizing one has options is a prerequist to taking the option. If one doesn't realize they have the option of just sitting in Starbucks without doing work then how are they supposed to stop hypertasking?

This isn't as simple as it sounds especially in a sectors of the economy that put the emphisis on "a lot is less is a lot more!" Like IT, if one person can manage 5 machines is there a way to make one person manage 10? Off the bat I would usually say "Yes, make them work twice as much". This is how you start down the path of hypertasking. You load up workers with abnormal but do able amounts of work. You find yourself having to do things at every possible moment of your day. It becomes habitial that you must be busy else you are doing something wrong. And once it becomes habitual it becomes harder to think "should I be doing this?" Worse yet is that your boss starts behaving and expecting high workloads as the norm. Your boss doesn't see any good reason why he should have people maintain five machines when they can maintain ten.

So sure you can say "just back off" but there are behavioral and monetary reasons they can't just back off. Striving to make operational units do more work with less reason is a good thing. However if they are already as efficient as possible, the only way to boost productivity is to make them hypertask. As the article points out this productivity really isn't an improvement since it costs the "sanity" of your workers.

I understand this.

[ONU CS Geek]

I currently work anywhere from 60 to 90 hours every week. This is on-the-clock time, not including time I spend doing paperwork, reading and studying for certifications, and answering calls from technicians that are in the field that have questions.

The first month it was hard getting myself into that schedule and way of life...now, if I take a day off in the week, my body wants to go and do things....

It's really sad...at one point in time, I worked to relieve stress....and now my secondary stress reliever is stressing me out.