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.