The Assumption of Multi-Tasking
It’s taken me a long time, but I’ve finally come to accept that age is not just affecting my physical self, but also my intellectual one. I got into certain habits at the age of 26 which, a decade later, I have to break for pure practicality’s sake, because they are simply not possible, anymore. Things such as working past 9:00 p.m., getting a full night’s rest sleeping on a red eye flight, keeping details in my head and NEVER writing anything down, being patient when people repeat themselves, and rapid-fire context-switching and multi-tasking.
That last one is the most dangerous because, in the tech field, the basic assumption is that everyone multi-tasks. This assumption is so prevalent that if someone walks into a meeting without a laptop, smart phone or iPad, they get strange looks. People who walk around with a pad and paper are the subject of jokes and teasing. It is simply expected that, during a meeting, you are doing other things.
There is a knock-on affect to this which particularly bothers me: because the assumption is that everyone is multi-tasking, there is a very rude and sloppy habit of inviting everyone and their brother to a meeting. The result is that people’s time is wasted carelessly, because there is no consideration put into who is truly needed for a meeting and who merely needs to be informed of the results after the meeting is over.
After all, if everyone spends every moment of their day doing multiple things at once, then why do we need to respect people’s time by being selective and deliberate about who we include in meetings?
Since there is nothing in the universe that bothers me more than having my time wasted (except possibly having my team’s time wasted), this is something that has been particularly frustrating to me lately. People carelessly and impolitely sucking up working hours by dragging me to meetings which I have no real reason to attend means that my real work — the work that requires thought, concentration, problem-solving and in-depth analysis — gets pushed to off-work hours.
And, because I’ve turned into a dismal old hag who can’t stay awake past 9:30 p.m. to save my life anymore, this means getting up at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. to get work done. But since people schedule meetings for me until 5:00 or 6:00 p.m., my days just get longer and longer, I get more and more tired, and things that used to never phase me start bothering me more and more.
(And, for the purposes of this rant, we’ll skip the massive impact this has on my physical health, husband, friends, family and social life.)
Of course, the other way in which my multi-tasking problem continues to manifest itself is emotional: once I start getting upset at people wasting my time, I find that I struggle more and more to shake it off, get my head back in the game and push through what I am capable of getting done.
Yet one more example of why my next career is probably going to have to involve working with dogs. They never even try to multi-task. It’s one of their most endearing qualities.
