Expecting Your Staff to Multitask? It's Not Necessarily a Good Idea.

Multitasking became a popular corporate buzzword in the mid-nineties, and now job ads routinely include the phrase "ability to multitask." For both support staff and management, juggling multiple responsibilities in the course of a day is expected, and employees who don't succeed in this juggling act rarely last long.

However, more and more information suggests that multitasking, rather than being efficient and effective, more often than not results in outcomes that are far from optimum. Rather than doing one task at a time extremely well, many workers accomplish a lot in a day but with a significant drop in the quality of work. Executives that sit in on meetings and spend the time going over their plans for the day probably aren't going to retain all the information that was imparted in the meeting, and probably haven't planned their day as well as they could have if they'd taken a few quiet minutes to themselves, without interruptions.

Is there a more effective alternative to multitasking? Yes! A combination of organization and scheduling can handle most routine tasks, whether at a management level or for support staff. Organizing needed information, both paperwork and electronic files, to allow easy access saves time and energy; scheduling work to be done in chunks of time, one task at a time, allows for more intense concentration.

There will always be interruptions and emergencies to handle; but an organization that encourages its staff to plan ahead, schedule work in a realistic manner, and minimize juggling of multiple tasks may find that productivity will increase.