Somebody at some point of time coined the word multitasking. And everyone fell for it, believing that it was quickest route to productivity. Multitasking means doing multiple things at the same time. The result, however, is that you either end up doing nothing, or mess up everything. To use a fancy popular US slang, it is like dividing one’s mental resources between multiple tasks till the STHF (shit hits the fan). The result can be imagined. Multitasking has been portrayed as the ‘in’ thing in many business models and even management literature had to create scope for the jargon to be experimented with as a practice. But the fact is that multitasking leads to division of attention between too many things. The keyword is attention. Human brain is fashioned in such a way that allows you to attend to one stimuli at one time. A very simple yet appropriate analogy given by psychologists few decades ago entailed a mechanical model of attention that explained the process as a Y-shaped tube in which two separate channels of ping-pong balls merge in a central channel protected by a filter that allows only one ball to enter. This was also explained by dichotic listening experiments carried out much earlier in which people were asked to retain information upon listening to two different messages given through the two ears. It was a typical attention-distraction model highlighting the importance of attention in perceiving the external stimuli. Against this backdrop, we need to understand why in the present times no one is listening and the result is chaos. There is too much information bombarding the human senses from too many directions. Pieces of information are practically competing with one another for capturing the attention of the recipient. This competition has in itself become a distraction hampering the learning and understanding process. Information is impinging the human senses but is not being received. The human mind has become wayward  almost like the movement of the molecules which is explained in Physics as Brownian motion. It is erratic, random and continuous. While big data is the topic of discussion, big confusion is the state of the mind. With a laptop screen in front of the eyes and Android phone in the hand — one is not even trying to listen but simply feigning to listen. If a CEO-like creature wants to give instructions under such circumstance, can he speak sense? He cannot. But this is what is happening. Meeting after meeting consumes hours but produces nothing. The problem is that people are not ready to believe it. To make matters worse, this is becoming the norm. Everyone is trying to ape this form of multitasking that is some kind of a fashion statement. Naturally, those who want to be somebody have to prove that they are busy even if there is no need for that. This model has percolated down to all levels. People claim to be in meetings, adding value and attending to emails at the same time. For those who are not in business and are not in a position to schedule and conduct meetings, Facebook and WhatsApp come in handy to help them seem busy. Just a glance at the posts that are written and posted would prove that all is not well on the thinking front. While Psychologists had proved long back that you can’t do two things at the same time, recent findings suggest that the mere presence of a competing stimulus affects the ability to attend and concentrate. But the modern day workplace and even home is witnessing competing interferences from different stimuli resulting in an inability to connect.

Pathak is a professor of management, writer, and an acclaimed public speaker. He can be reached at ppathak.ism@gmail.com