Living in a staccato world

How many times have you seen a job ad asking for the ability to multitask? If you’re like me, you’ve lost count. And, if you’re like me, you may have found yourself asking, so, which projects do you want done poorly? Which clients are high value enough to focus on?

I was reminded of the workplace multitasking myth when the Washington Post published an obituary of Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor whose research on human-computer interaction led to the unmasking of the story that human minds can truly do more than one task at a time.

Nass and his colleagues found that those students who claimed to be laser-beam focused multitaskers were actually lousy at organizing information and discerning significance; they weren’t even very good at switching attention at will. Writing samples from Stanford freshmen multitaskers “showed a tendency toward shorter sentences and disconnected paragraphs.”

In a 2011 lecture, according to the Post, Nass said of multitaskers, “They are living and writing in a staccato world.”

Perhaps there are jobs where it is more important to do a lot of things at a mediocre level all at once than doing one task at a time well, but I don’t think design is one of them. What do you think?