You think you are a great multitasker? You are not. Nobody is.
MS Teams is a fantastic tool in business. It not only connects the work community with each other, it offers meeting, chat, call, collaborating options by file sharing and storing, by colleagues on remote continents working simultaneously on the same document and so on.
And yet, this is not the promotion of MS Teams neither of any of its competitive platforms.
These platforms also bring into our lives the obligation of 24/7 availability and multitasking on levels that we have never seen before.
You will find the situation very familiar if you are a user of these platform too.
You are presenting, you are running a ppt presentation on your screen and simultaneously explaining to the audience. Today, it is not only accepted, but expected that questions are raised not at the end of your presentation, not by raising a hand, but by simultaneously sending them in in the chat.
The issue is multiple: if you are typing questions, you are not listening. If I’m presenting, I don’t see your comments. If I’m reading your questions, I cannot present. If, for any reason I need sound on my notebook, your arriving questions ping me out of my attention span 3 seconds.
When the meeting is over, it is nice to say thanks to the presenter, organizer. Issue: the thank-you notes regularly go from each participants to each participants. Ping-ping-ping… as many times as many participants. You can, of course, mute your device – it means that you will miss everything else too.
This kind of working style was one of the reason why I decided to do with corporations forever. Because it was not only MS Teams. We were expected to be “green” (available) there, but regular emails kept arriving and needed reactions, and we also had a Whatsapp group for urgent stuff, and of course, you were expected to pick your phone up when it was ringing. All this resulted in running parallel 1to1 calls during conference calls, catching up with emails during video conferences, etc.
And all this is only communication, the actual work that you are supposed to do is not included here.
Task Switching: The ability to shift focus among tasks or contexts
I know, I cannot multitask. But MOST PEOPLE BELIEVE THEY can. Most people, in fact, believe they’re very good at multitasking. In one famous study, a statistically absurd but remarkably confident 70 percent of participants thought they were above average in their ability to do multiple things at once.
They weren’t, and you aren’t, either. When people try to do several things at once, almost everyone—a full 98 percent,—gets worse at each individual task. And another study, at Stanford, found that people who habitually multitask actually do more poorly over time. In other words, the more you practice texting and driving, the more of a menace you are on the road. The idea that anyone can talk on the phone, answer emails, tidy their workspace, and think through the kids’ after-school schedule all at once is enticing, but it’s also cognitively impossible. The conscious mind simply isn’t set up to focus on multiple things at the same time. Even that tiny minority 2 percent who didn’t get worse or even improved weren’t truly multitasking. They were task switching at an exceptionally rapid and efficient rate.
All of us can task switch. That means that even when we’re focused on one thing, our brain is updating scripts for the next thing.
One problem is that most of us don’t realize that we are debilitating our performance by deliberately shifting context more often than we should — and usually for no good reason.
Smartphones have no doubt enhanced our ability to communicate.
Unnecessary context switching: Your phone is a massive collection of contexts. The Instagram posts, the shopping app, the game app, the text threads, the news, the weather forecast.
You’ll be in a real-world context — an important conversation with a friend or a meeting at work — and you’ll hear that ping or buzz. Even if you think you’re choosing to ignore it, your brain isn’t.
Neurologically, it’s like being teleported from a bookstore to a soccer field. Your brain has to expend energy refreshing its understanding of the new context.
Research shows that when we shift out of our current context by immediately attending to our little devices, it takes an average of twenty minutes to fully refocus on the task at hand.
Focus on what you want to do and switch off – at least while you’re talking to someone important to you, or you are working on an important task. Then, when finished, you can switch back and let all the information impulses inundate your phone and your brain.
But when you are in something important – be there. 100%.