Week 14 - April 12

Only 2% Of People Can Actually Multitask

Two things to begin with: first, the multitasking test was extremely confusing; second, the directions were poorly written. I gave up about halfway through the first round because I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing.

Actual multi-tasking is difficult. I find that when I’m listening to music and working on the computer, my brain is so focused on what I’m working on that I can’t recall the song that just played. What this means for digital culture is that we try to txt friends, surf Facebook, or check game scores while we’re with people but we end up tuning something out. Often, it’s our friends we tune out. This happens so often. You’re listening to a friend but you just got an email that you need to respond to. Of course you respond but you don’t want to seem rude to your friend so you throw a few well-placed “Uh-huh”s and “mm hmm”s in but really, you don’t remember what they just said to you.

It would be interesting to see brain scans of people when they think they’re multitasking and of people when they really are multitasking. What neural pathways are different for the “supertaskers” versus the incapable?

7 Things You Need to Stop Doing to be More Productive

“Stop being a perfectionist.” This one is extremely important. A coworker of mine is a perfectionist and it gets in the way of meeting deadlines and it lengthens the time it takes to complete a task drastically. Inefficiency and missed deadlines are not things that make worklife easier.  Unfortunately in the creative field, it’s easy to nitpick and become a perfectionist. The graphic has to be perfect; the photo has to be flawless. But not stepping back and saying “It’s good enough” hinders productivity. Those two extra house spent picking out the perfect typeface could have been used on a different project.

“Don’t say ‘yes’ too often” really resonates with me. I have a terrible habit of telling someone I will join a group, do a task, help with a thing simply because I don’t want to disappoint them. I usually also believe that I do have time to add X to my list of things to do. I’ve done a much better job in the past few months of saying “no” to adding things to my plate. It really has allowed my plate to be less full so other things can have more room.