By Kevin M
Last week in The Power of Saying NO we covered how to free up your time and energy for more productive activities by making more frequent use of the word “no”. By saying “no” to the constant requests for help, participation, interaction and other forms of engagement others will draw us into, we can keep ourselves focused on our main goals.
Today I want to cover another common time and energy drain–multitasking. This has to be one of the most over worked phrases in the English language, and perhaps the most draining of all activities. What it mostly implies is that in order to be efficient, we need to spread ourselves wide and thin to do the jobs of several people.
It’s easy to see why multitasking is popular with employers—the more jobs they can get fewer people to do, the less staff they need. That translates to lower payroll and, in theory at least, a healthier bottom line.
But here’s what multitasking does to the individual and, by extension, to the organization:
- Creates an environment of perpetual interruption
- Makes personal and organizational goals harder to reach
- Dilutes (or even erases at the extreme) primary job functions
- Generates needless stress
- Eliminates specialization, or the efficient matching of jobs with personal talent
- Creates confusion—if everyone does every job in the organization, who should be doing which job and when?
- Transfers responsibility for all functions to the highest performers, who become bogged down covering every job rather than the one they were hired to do.
Is that any way run your department? Is that any way to run your business or your career? The goal of every manager, business owner, and employee needs to be to make their primary function the primary function!
