Juggling, or the Art of Effective Multitasking

Hello, my name is Tim, and I juggle during meetings.

I’m not doing it to be rude, I’m not ignoring you, and I’m not trying to distract you. I’m doing it to save you and me from my worst habits.

Hold up, let me explain.

Imagine a situation

You’re at work, it’s 5pm and you have two meetings left. You still haven’t finished your tasks from this morning, there’s a small pile of urgent emails to read in your inbox, and … damn you forgot to put the new cover sheet on your TPS reports that are due by end of day. What’s a consummate professional like yourself to do in this situation ?

Perhaps you tell yourself that you can read emails during the first meeting, and then complete your TPS reports during the second meeting. These meetings happen every week, and it’s not like anyone would notice anyway, right ? Everyone else has their laptop out during the meeting, it’s just this one time, and next week it will all be different, you assure yourself.

So you go ahead and allow yourself that dopamine hit, scrolling through a pile of email while the first meeting drags on. By the end of the day, your email may be marked as read, those reports submitted, and the meetings attended, but do you really feel good about yourself ? Did any of that feel meaningful ?

Did you even remember anything your colleagues said in the meeting ? 😱

Multitasking considered harmful

It should come as no surprise today that multitasking is harmful. Whether you’re considering the health impacts or the impacts in the workplace the science is clear and it doesn’t look good for anyone who multitasks consistently.

A short list of the negative side effects of multitasking includes

• decreased quality of work
• increased defect rate
• loss of focus
• memory problems
• difficulty to learn new things
• increased stress

And yet, and yet … we still do it, despite all the risks.

What is appealing in multitasking

Multitasking is a form of cheating yourself, it’s a shortcut. Multitasking is like ordering fast food instead of cooking a meal; you might feel good initially, but there will be costs to pay later.

One reason we multitask is when we find ourselves faced with an unplanned difficulty. If we find our current task is difficult, we feel blocked, and we know that making progress on another task will feel good. However, this puts us in a hard spot because once you’ve made some small progress on a second task, it will appear harder to return to your first difficult task and complete it. What happens if your new task is hard, or has a dependency on the first one ? Won’t it be tempting to do three things in parallel ?

Afterall, once we’ve already multitasked once, couldn’t we multitask again ?

Multitasking leads to more multitasking

Even worse, allowing yourself that dopamine hit of stepping away from your difficult task will encourage you to find more small tasks and multitask more and more. Before you know it, you have a small pile of large tasks started but nothing is finished. You’re working harder and harder, but going nowhere and nothing is finished. This brings to mind what the Red Queen tells Alice in Through The Looking Glass (Alice in Wonderland)

> “My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.”

According to the LEAN startup mindset, the act of multitasking generates waste. Until a piece of work is finished, and I mean really, truly finished, it has no value. While it might hurt, it’s best to either fully push on through your work item, or fully deprioritise it if something else is truly more urgent. Doing so will allow you to realise the full value of the work you can complete, reduce the stress from additional tasks, and allow you more focus to achieve more things more quickly, ultimately.

The important thing is to realize you’re not doing two things at once. You either switch tasks and say the first one is not in progress, or you stay focused and waste to start your new teaste.

What if we … multitask anyway ?

All of this might seem a bit idealistic. After all, the world is busy, we have a lot of committments, and we might not be able to say no to some interruptions. Perhaps a little multitasking isn’t so bad ? If we’re responsible for a production environment, surely we shouldn’t blindly ignore the problems when it catches on fire after a bad deploy ? Couldn’t we consider multitasking just the act of being responsible ?

That’s true, and the way we reconcile this is in two steps

1. Split your work into small, individually valuable steps
2. Allow yourself to multitask in a way that permits you more focus

The first steps allows you to switch context without losing much. The smaller a task is, the less difficult it is to start anew.

Step 2 allows you to multitask while still being present.

How does juggling fit into this anyway ?

When I’m juggling, I’m listening. I’m not looking at my balls, I’m looking at my colleagues in the eye and I’m fully present.

Juggling is a sport, and studies show that physical activity increases blood flow, health and creativity. As a low-contact activity, it’s easy to juggle while also giving the vast majority of your attention to someone or something else. It is entirely possible to be active in a meeting, listening, engaging, while also juggling one, two, or three balls. After a few hours of training, most people are able to juggle a simple three ball pattern without dropping one. Many people work in offices, or in their home in meetings or other calls where staying focused and present is an obvious expectation. Juggling is one great way to work your brain, burn some calories, get a dopamine hit, while also staying present and engaged in your work.

Health benefits of juggling

Juggling a simple three ball pattern such as the three ball cascade takes very minimal mental effort with some practice. Even an amateur juggler will report that juggling such a pattern is no more mentally taxing than taking a light stroll or casual bicycle ride. Surely if the CEO of a large company can walk at their standing desk during meetings, one could juggle as well.

Additionally, juggling has many additional benefits

• improved hand-eye coordination
• improved manual dexterity
• improved concentration
• reduces anxiety and stress by working the temporal lobe of the brain

Plausible alternatives to multitasking

Of course, juggling isn’t the only solution for effective multitasking, but it’s one plausible choice that works well for myself and others. In the past few years, I’ve compiled a short list of activities myself and my colleagues have used at work to keep our attention high during boring meetings and keep our hands off the keyboard.

• Juggling
• Crochet
• Doodling
• Take notes on paper
• Fidget toys

Ultimately, what you choose doesn’t matter so long as it interests you, takes a minimal amount of focus, and doesn’t bother your colleagues. If you’re going to juggling during zoom calls, I highly recommend getting skilled enough to do it without dropping a ball for several minutes at a time, to avoid awkward interruptions.