racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

Here’s another linkove going the Taorist’s way. Today, Taorist posts on why multitasking can be harmful to business. Unfortunately, though, businesses nowadays are fond of having employees multi-task! He calls it the worst business invention of all time.

My problem with this, is that the lone multitasker would be forced to deal with work loads that would far exceed the capabililty of one person.
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Most managers would disagree with my proposals because it takes time and money to develop these, but in the long run–it’ll be better for the company and result in high company loyalty.

Now I, for one, know that Taorist is in the Human Resources (HR) profession, so he should know about this stuff!

I, myself, had been dabbling in human resource themes, with my previous content-creation projects, and my foremost realization would be that the best employee is the happy employee.

And then I know a handful of local companies who try to squeeze every bit of effort from their employees (yes, multitasking included) without the commensurate compensation. These employees in turn get burned out easily and eventually move on to better things.

I’d say let’s keep multitasking to our hyper-threaded, dual-core, 64-bit-processing computers! Or at least, let’s limit this to the routine work, and not those that require creativity and deep thinking.

I agree with Taorist that the HR process should be fine-tuned to look for the productive people rather than deadwoods. But then, creativity requires concentration and inspiration! If you ask me, I’d rather go for the creative-types than drones who will do your every bidding. I’ve actually been head-hunting (well, still in the process, really), and this is one of the things I first look for in prospective employees.

Update, 1:21 a.m., May 21, 2006 – I found this interesting post on Multitasking over at Creating Passionate Users.

But where I once believed that the myth of multitasking was about time (that doing four things simultaneously takes much longer than to do those same four things in sequence), scientists now know it’s also about quality. And it gets worse… it’s not just that the quality of those four things in parallel will suffer, it’s that your ability to think and learn may suffer. Some researchers believe that all this constant, warpspeed, always-on multitasking is causing young people, especially, to become less able to follow any topic deeply.

Greg writes on the perennial problem at the workplace named “interruptions.” According to our friendly usability expert, it is a programmer’s nemesis: one millisecond of interruption could disturb one’s “flow,” or nudge one out of his “zone.”

Here’s my response, which I posted on ForeverGeek. An excerpt:

I would think this same principle applies to other creative types, as well. And this includes writers, artists, and other people who rely on concentration and inspiration to work effectively and efficiently.

True, programmers need time to think up workflows and other logical stuff in their heads, and then finally put this into a coherent, cohesive code that would hopefully also mesh well with other programmers’ own sets of code. But the same goes with words, sentences, strokes of a brush or pencil, and even photo compositions, and other such multimedia.

I had drafted the entry here, and was supposed to hit the publish button already, when I thought I’d post it over at FG instead, so I could have a wider reach, and since I thought it’s FG material.

You can either earn it, or you can win it.

For the first one, I do have fine details I’d be glad to share with you. For the second, well, it’s been discussed and will be announced in a bit.

It’s in the tune of several hundreds.

So either get in touch with me, or stay tuned.

Holy crap! iBlog2 already has more than 300 registrants!

I wonder how I can muster up enough courage to speak in front of an audience this afternoon. I haven’t done this in years (pitfalls of working in front of a computer all the time, I guess).