Daily Dose 57: Multitasking and Dovetailing

Years ago, multitasking–doing several tasks at once–received positive press. Organized people deftly performed two, three, and four things simultaneously. Having such employees meant increased productivity and profit margins.

Recent studies dampened the enthusiasm. Turns out, once put to the test, these organizers did not attend as well as they thought to their various assignments. Concentrating on one task, then moving to another, (i.e. changing focus) brought better results. The subjects believed they performed well, but the hard cold facts disproved their impressions of their performances.

Dovetailing

Dovetailing is a woodworking term, referring to notching different pieces of wood in opposite patterns, and then fitting them together to form a tight bond without using glue. Rather than simply trying to do several things at once, I prefer the idea of thinking through which complementary tasks can be receive alternating attention in order to fit well together. When a “good fit” is found, it will be a natural connection of two or more tasks into a tight knit unit of activity.

The key lies in the types of tasks getting this dovetailing treatment. Two tasks, both requiring concentration and physical actions (driving and texting is a current prime example) do not make good partners.

On the other hand, automated hand work (washing dishes, vacuuming, making beds, and the like) can be done well with a mind task such as praying, planning menus, reciting verses, or thinking through the afternoon schedule. Even when two tasks fit together, the link is improved by consciously “practicing” the connection.

Another successful type of connection is when one of our appliances is doing work and needs only intermittent attention from us to keep it moving forward while we do something else.

The Key is Prioritizing the Multiple Tasks

One of the tasks must be easy to stop or be ignored, when conditions warrant, and will take the “secondary” role.  Reading magazine articles and searching for recipes when a son or daughter needs to seriously talk is a good example of when to attend rather than to multitask.

One certainty about dovetailing: the more thought put into developing little schemes and processes (the bathroom cleaning system, how the family coordinates the time from wake-up to devotions or wake-up to house-leaving, how much kitchen cleaning gets done in the twelve minutes after dinner), the more effective your dovetailing ideas are likely to be. Thinking about streamlining bathroom cleaning might lead to an experiment of brushing teeth with one hand and cleaning the sink area with the other. If it worked, sink cleaning would become a twice a day habit, and could be removed from the weekly routine!

A good steward can certainly attend to more than one thing when one task receives primary attention and another only requires intermittent or occasional bursts of attention. Supervising an activity with young children, remembering to change the washer, and minding the simmering soup is a mark of a facile administrator, when some what-if planning has been put into the mix.

What if the children get hurt and need full attention? (Ignoring the washer is easy, but intentional effort must turn off heat and, ideally, refrigerate pan. Can someone else do that or must it be you?) What if we must deal with an unsatisfactory behavior sequence? (Both simmering soup and washer can be ignored for the time it will take.)

Normally, the children can receive full attention because the other activities have been brought to a point of light supervision rather than active engagement and you have planned what to do if the required attention priority changes. This would be effective dovetailing, rather than scatter shot attention that is a problem waiting to happen–something executives work to avoid.