All this talk of multitasking

Alice Wignall

Does it make you a more effective worker? Hardly. It just means more work.

THERE ARE always articles being written (and who knows, even read) about how the office is changing and how soon everybody will be hot-desking and short-term contracting and building career portfolios and retraining every third minute.

"Trend predictors" (or "fortune tellers" to give them their original job title) never get sick of telling us about how, in a few years, we'll all be working part-time from a hammock in the Caribbean and video-conferencing with the lunar colony, and we had just better be ready for that.

And it sounds really great. But let's not forget that the brave new world of work will mean being able to do new things. This might be called "acquiring a differentiated skills set" and if I knew what that meant I could tell you for sure. But you'll need to learn how to balance your laptop and a mid-afternoon cocktail in your Caribbean hammock while keeping sand out of both, just for a start. And I bet that's not as easy as it looks.

Many of the necessary abilities have already been identified. These days, it's so much less about being nifty with an inkwell and quill pen, and so much more about communication and flexibility, and enabling individual proactivity within a dynamic group setting. And I can get on board with all of that, since basically what it boils down to is being able to have a nice chat with people in the office.

However, the jewel in the crown of any self-respecting modern worker is the ability to multitask. For years, I just accepted this, figured that the people who invented the concept knew what they were talking about. Recently, though, I have concluded that we're all being taken for a multitasking ride.

Does multitasking make you a more effective worker? Not in my experience. I'm doing a bit of multitasking while I write this, in actual fact. OK, the other task is listening to the radio, but let's not dwell on that. The point is: does it sharpen my mental faculties? Is it helping ideas crystallise before my eyes like frost on windowpanes? Is it allowing words to gush from my mind like a rushing stream after the thaw? Or have I just wasted 10 minutes wondering exactly what this infernal noise is and why anyone could possibly describe it as music?

How to work out that multitasking might not be a great key to success in the modern workplace? Nobody wants you to do it until you get a job. Your parents don't drag you down from your nice, quiet bedroom and insist you do your homework in front of the television while interrupting you every 10 minutes to ask your opinion on next week's shopping list. Librarians at your university didn't institute a "no silence" rule in their book-bound halls and wander around asking random people if they'd like to sit in on their staff meeting.

Of course, women are supposed to be excellent multitaskers — presumably because we have spent so many millennia juggling 13 children and some chicken, while working out how to create a Christmas feast from one turnip and a sprig of wild garlic that the ability to do so many things at once is now second nature.

Let me tell you what multitasking means: it's people being allowed to distract you whenever they like; it's suddenly having to be expert in things you're not interested in; it is, essentially, doing more work. No wonder the powers that be are keen to give it the hard-sell. So, for me, it's the end of multitasking. I am going to do one thing after the other and that is it.

And this will not put me at a disadvantage. For I have one skill that will shortly be in big demand. I am great at balancing things in a hammock. —
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006