Ok am I alone in thinking this is an unrealistic expectation???
Think I definitely need to find time to listen to the whole podcast being mentioned here for context but at first read of this meme and some of the comments over on IG all I got is that after spending 30 years working in an industry where you HAD to multitask or you risked children being injured or lost that I must have been able to adapt to having a big wide ass lens on my flashlight so I can see/do/manage more than one thing at a time … I am constantly used to doing 2-3 or more tasks/jobs simultaneously and having focus on ALL of them and yet still able to work quickly and yield great accuracy in my results!
I will admit that when I was able to leave large centres and work in a smaller ratio of children that I was able to yield even BETTER results but I was still having to multitask constantly it was just way easier with only 5 littles vs having up to 12!
Also admit on the last factor - YES it can be exhausting to work in settings where it’s required to constantly multitask … but there are SO many jobs where your are constantly expected to multi task simultaneously and where the ability TO do it is seen as valuable to employers - even when I worked in restaurants you had 20-30 orders up in the air at any given time all in various stages of completion and having to bounce between doing that and answering incoming phone orders or people coming to the cash to check out. You needed to be able to have great recall to snap back to where you were in which orders completion and so forth. Can you imagine how SLOW restaurants would be if they only worked on one order start to finish in the back kitchen.
Or I think of people like Toad who are neurodivergent with ADHD or others on the autism spectrum who find having to focus on just one task very challenging to stick with and actually produce better results if they are, for example, playing with a toy in their hands, while focusing on being required to read and also needing some auditory stimuli like music on in background.
What are your thoughts on multi-tasking? Something we need to eliminate or a basic skill requirement to be honed to keep up in this era? As always you are welcome to come join the conversation in our private Totallyawake4-life & Nailin' It Together community!
Margaret
Live, Laugh, Love
Be Totallyawake4-life
