sleepcamel.net : brad weikel

Over at 43Folders, Merlin Mann has twice been critical of the concept of multitasking.

In general, I take his perspective to heart, in the sense that what we call multitasking is often just a cluttered use of time, which creates the illusion of efficiency at the expense of... well... efficiency.

However, there are plenty of counterexamples as well. For instance, consider that while I was listening to Merlin's podcast debunking multi-tasking, I read three emails (and deleted them, in keeping with Mann's Inbox Zero philosophy), and emptied the latest 15 items out of my RSS reader. Was this not multi-tasking? True, I was slightly distracted from the podcast and probably missed a few thoughts, but I got out of it everything that I needed and wanted to, and didn't waste precious cycles hanging on Merlin's every word.

Mann's anti-multitasking opinion is based largely on the notion that three todo items (A, B, and C) will take the same amount of time if you perform them as AABBCC or if, by multitasking, you mix them up as ABCABC. The problem with that model is that certain tasks take a fixed amount of time, regardless of what else you are doing.

For instance, Mann's podcast was exactly 2:34. Let's say, also, that the tasks I accomplished while listening to it (email and RSS) took about 1:30. Had I not multitasked, this would have taken me more than 4 minutes, but by multitasking I reduced those 4 minutes down to 2:34.

So, frankly, it just seems a little backwards for someone who is so obsessed with GTD (Getting Things Done) to so completely dismiss multitasking. Really, what makes more sense is to split multitasking into True Multitasking and False Multitasking, and eliminate the false aspect... that's the part that is just clutter, and which costs you time as you try to switch contexts over and over. The valuable aspect of multitasking, on the other hand, is probably underutilized -- don't we all spend our first few minutes at the office watching our computer boot up, when we could be doing something more useful?

You know, like outlining your next blog post in your head.