Jonathan M Gitlin at Ars Technica has a good bit about the supposed evils of multitasking on your computer at work:

The complaints against multitasking are the usual; you’re not as focused as you could be if you were just doing one thing at once, switching focus repeatedly actually makes you less productive as each time your brain takes a few moments to reprioritize tasks and so on.

I’m the first to admit that there’s a lot be said for shutting down everything else and focusing on a single task when you just need to power through and get something done, but these days talk of ‘multitasking’ seems to take the form of huffy managers cruising through the office, looking over shoulders and trying to catch a glimpse of someone looking at something “non-work-related”.

This, quite frankly, is a lame thing to do.

Gitlin again:

Employers seek ever-greater productivity from their workers, which means getting more work from them for the same amount of pay. Faced with that situation, it’s hardly surprising the cube-dweller responds by spending 15 minutes an hour looking at LOLCATs. Besides, I’m just old enough to remember the days before you used to be able to multitask; people used to sit at their desks reading the newspaper instead.

Technology has definitely exasperated this issue. It seems entirely acceptable for an employee to spend 10 minutes chatting with co-workers about the movie they saw on the weekend or 5 minutes on a personal phone call, but apparently just a glimpse at Facebook is an instant productivity killer. The message, I guess — and this is coming from those generally clueless about everything online — is that you can’t be working if you’re also on some website.

The real issue I have with this is one of trust. By constantly monitoring your employees’ screens, by installing filters and blocks, by blanket policies forbidding access at work, you’re essentially saying to your employees that you can’t trust them. “Why would you do this stupid work I’ve assigned you when you have fun internet things to look at?”

Could spending a lot of time on Facebook at work cause an employee to miss deadlines or produce sub-quality work? Absolutely. And those employees should face hell because of that. But you’re always smarter to criticize and (if necessary) discipline based on outputs, not process. The process is entirely subjective and unique to each person, whereas the outputs can be objective.

If the work is getting done, does it really matter if the worker is ‘multitasking’ all day, bouncing between windows and tasks like — as Gitlin puts it — a crack-smoking housefly?

Technology has led to a diversification of work styles.¹ There is no ‘right’ way to get things done in the computer age. Trying to establish one-size-fits-all processes, policies or rules — even for something as seemingly frivolous as ‘banning Facebook’ — is a losing battle.

Thanks to Ari Najarian for pointing me to the article.

Photo by Vedlia. Licensed under Creative Commons

1. I’m thinking of things like keyboard users vs. mouse; command line versus GUI; maximized versus juggled windows; open source versus Microsoft, etc etc. [↩]

Tags: computers, facebook, internet, multitasking, rules, software, web

Related: March 21, 2008: Leaning on e-mail | March 10, 2008: Changes Employers Can Make for a Y-friendly workplace | May 23, 2008: Don’t Give Away All Your Creative Tasks |