If you’re going to multitask, do it mindfully

Doing more than one thing at once can feel overwhelming — but it can also be liberating.

You slaved your way through a boring degree; you forfeited your last ever long summer holiday for an internship; you put your life on hold while going through months of interviews; and in the end you managed to fight off 97 per cent of the competition to land a job at a Big Four accounting firm. It’s not much fun, and your work-life balance is frankly terrible, but at least the pay is decent, and you have job security. And then, out of the blue, you’re fired without warning. Your crime? Multitasking.

It might sound preposterous, and indeed it is. But that was the reality for the several dozen EY employees who were fired recently, ostensibly for having dared to attend several online training sessions at the same time. (Some have suggested these were lay-offs in disguise. I wouldn’t want to speculate.)

One might argue that these former staff members were simply showing initiative. Presumably anyone who spent the training scrolling through social media was safe as long as they were only attending one session. But EY claimed their actions constituted an ethical breach. “Our core values of integrity and ethics are at the forefront of everything we do,” the company said. One of the firees complained the company “breeds a culture of multitasking”, asking: “If you are forced to bill 45 hours a week and do many more hours of internal work, how can it not?” Quite.

Ask the internet whether multitasking is a good thing, and while it might not inform you that it is in fact a sackable offence, it will certainly come down heavily against it. “Stop Multitasking. No, Really — Just Stop It,” ran the headline on a recent piece by productivity guru Oliver Burkeman in The New York Times. Variations on the theme abound.

The arguments against multitasking tend to coalesce around the idea that it is in fact “a myth”: we cannot really focus on more than one thing at once, and therefore what we are doing instead is “task-switching”, which is both taxing for the brain and highly inefficient. One frequently cited study found that multitasking can have as much as a 40 per cent hit on productivity. Another found that only 2.5 per cent of us are able to do it without performance on tasks suffering.

I certainly agree with the general gist here — most of us should slow down, switch off, do less, get bored more often. But we need to distinguish between two different kinds of multitasking. There is the negative kind that sees us pulling out our phones while we’re watching a film or checking our emails when we’re trying to get a piece of difficult work done — that is often simply about running away at the first sign of discomfort; procrastinating. But there is a positive kind, too, that can actually boost productivity.

More than this, at least for those of us who don’t subscribe to the idea that our purpose on Earth is to be as productive as possible, this kind of multitasking can actually be rather magnificent. You have not lived, in my opinion, until you have stepped on to a cross-trainer with a copy of your favourite weekly magazine in hand and an upbeat playlist blaring in your headphones. I accept this would not be to everyone’s tastes. But for me, this combination — endorphins from the intense cardiovascular exercise, music to keep me going and to set the pace and, believe it or not, total immersion in my reading — can make for a quite euphoric experience. I get off the machine with my workout done, having read a 6,000-word article that I might otherwise struggle to focus on, and feeling exuberant.

This isn’t the kind of mindless, escapist multitasking one falls into without noticing it; this is mindful multitasking, that one consciously decides to engage in.

Another example — more widely relatable than my cross-training extravaganza, perhaps — would be speaking to someone on the phone while doing the dishes or listening to an audiobook while driving. My ability to listen and pay attention is vastly improved by doing something with my body rather than sitting still, and indeed studies have shown that doing something as simple as doodling can help focus — particularly for those of us who have difficulties in the area of attention.

Mindfulness teachers might say that the highest form of living would be to be totally present in the dishwashing — to notice the warmth of the water on our hands, to listen to the sweet clink of the glasses against each other, to breathe in the heady scent of the washing-up liquid — but I don’t seem to be quite there yet. With training sessions as scintillating as “How strong is your digital brand in the marketplace?” and “Conversing with AI, one prompt at a time”, one can hardly blame EY’s ex-employees for not having reached such a state of enlightenment, either.