What's Next: Taskus Interruptus

Why interruption, distraction, and multitasking are not such awful things after all.

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Hey, stupid. Yeah, that's right, I'm talking to you. You might think that your e-mail, BlackBerry, smart phone, always-on Web connection, and ever-growing array of computer applications make you smarter and more efficient. But you're wrong. Instead, all those shiny new tools make it impossible to concentrate on any one thing for more than a few minutes. And that is why you have become dumber and less effective.

Or so suggests a stream of recent studies. Researchers at the University of California, for example, studied a group of professionals and found that participants made it only an average of 11 minutes before some distraction yanked them off the task, after which it took 25 minutes to get back on it. Physician and attention deficit disorder expert Edward Hallowell, in his recent book CrazyBusy, compares multitasking to playing tennis with two balls, and says that constantly jumping between tasks not only leads to subpar performance, it also gives workers some of the symptoms of ADD. A psychologist at London's King's College suggests that constant exposure to e-mail and other multitasking-friendly technology temporarily lowers IQ by 10 points--or about as much as skipping a night's sleep and more than twice as much as smoking marijuana. And Basex Research, an IT market-research firm, surveyed office workers to figure the business bottom line to the growing distraction disaster. The answer: Companies lose an average of 2.1 hours per day of employee productivity because of multitasking and related interruptions, adding up to $588 billion in lost productivity to U.S. businesses.

These conclusions would explain a steady drop in the productivity of U.S. workers. The problem: Worker productivity, as measured by the government, not only has been on the rise since the early '90s, when all this technology started to come into play, but also has accelerated during the explosion of the multitasking phenomenon over the past five years.

So what gives? Does multitasking really impair our ability to get our jobs done? The answer for most workers is, I think, no. But it's not because multitasking doesn't impair your ability to perform tasks. It does. It's because we're now in a complex, fast-response world in which getting a complete task done in the least amount of time is no longer the priority. Instead, today's top priority is to immediately address whatever fraction of a vast, malleable range of tasks has become most critical--a just-in-time, networked workstyle. Focusing on one task to the exclusion of others isn't even an option anymore. When experts examine the detrimental effects of multitasking on productivity, they're asking the wrong question. We don't need to wonder about the ways in which multitasking and interruption impair our ability to speed through a task. We need to appreciate the ways in which multitasking and interruption have become essential to meeting the increasingly nonlinear demands of our jobs.

That means it's essential not only to put up with but also to embrace multitasking. Fifteen years ago, it was almost impossible to get a fast response in midevening, or even midday, from your head of product development or the CEO of a key supplier. But today, with projects and products being zipped around the globe, chances are you know exactly how to get someone's attention at a moment's notice. And the ability to do so has a direct impact on the bottom line, says Michael McCloskey, CEO of FrontRange Solutions, a customer relationship management software and services provider in Dublin, California. "If I'm in a price negotiation with a big customer, and they've got their legal and purchasing people right there, and they want an answer to a question, I better be able to get that answer," he says. "Because I may not be able to get those people in the same room talking about my product again anytime soon." McCloskey admits that he often has to interrupt people during important tasks to do so. But he has no second thoughts. "Ninety percent of the time," he says, "it's worth it."

Meanwhile, businesses have long been moving away from the sort of stovepipe structure that allowed employees to focus on meeting the demands of a single boss or worry only about a small group of employees or customers. Today the dotted-line relationships form a dense web that extends out to customers, suppliers, and partners. In other words, forget about closing the door and crunching on that one presentation. You've got 20 other people breathing at you just as hard, and each one wants to know that you're making progress. "The way we look at getting the job done is changing," says Martin Frid-Nielsen, CEO of Soonr, a Campbell, California, company offering a service that connects cell phones to PC applications. "It's about how in touch you are and how you're engaging many other people."

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