While multitasking is considered a common selling point on a resume, this thought process might be flawed.
“Employers are more interested in outcomes than efforts. Multitasking refers to the latter,” says Anne Grinols, MBA professor and assistant dean for faculty development and college initiatives at the Hankamer School of Business at Baylor University in Texas.
Instead of including “multitasking” on a resume, Grinols says that she “would indicate expertise in multiple areas, timely production and excellence in outcomes.”
Additionally, Grinols highlighted three additional misconceptions about multitasking:
1. People believe they can focus on two mental activities at once. There is both conscious and unconscious accomplishment of tasks, Grinols explains. Unconscious activities, like driving or other things we do often, don't get the same attention as new activities and can run on autopolit.
Conscious mental activity, on the other hand, happens one activity at a time. So when people multitask, Grinols says, they lose some time and efficiency of brain function that robs them of effective accomplishment of one activity—or both—as their focus goes back and forth.
2. People believe they can go back and forth between mental activities and stay on top of both of them. When people say they can multitask, Grinols says they think they can accomplish more than others because they can focus on more than one thing at once. However, multitasking can also be a negative.
“I think this is because efforts to multitask have had unfortunate results: poor outcomes and burnout of those trying to do it for extended periods of time,” Grinols explains.
Grinols found this to be true in her 2014 study, where students read an excerpt of material during class time while having complete access to their cell phones. Most received multiple texts, which they were allowed to read and respond to. The more texts, the less worse students did on the comprehension test all of them took at the end of the period.
“Some of them were surprised at how poorly they did,” Grinols says. “We were surprised at how many texts they received by their friends who knew they were in class.”
3. People believe they can monitor themselves as they attempt to multitask. Grinols shares an observation of a fourth grade teacher, who told her class, “Do not watch TV while you do your homework or you will find yourself doing TV while you watch your homework.”
“Unfortunately, most of us do not monitor ourselves as well as we think we do,” Grinols says. “If your current assignments are to develop a new strategy to accomplish a goal and also to participate in a team meeting, don’t start thinking about the strategy as you sit in the meeting or your active participation in the meeting, which includes listening to the input of others, will suffer.”
And since employers expect “optimal-level accomplishment,” Grinols says that employees must focus on each task separately to be able to succeed at an optimal level at whatever they’re assigned.