Multitasking causes Overwork, not long hours.

Doc Hallowell over at CrazyBusy has a short summary of a study on a thousand Americans about the whys and wherefores of being overworked done by the Families and Work Institute, and being in a state of perpetual overwork, I practically broke my fingers this morning going there in the hopes of some relief.

The study done in 2004 confirms the obvious: about 1/3 of us are chronically overworked, and being overworked leads to mistakes, pisses us off and screws up our health. No surprises there, but it never hurts to see the numbers.

What was more interesting to me was the difference the study found between being in Overwork Hell and working long hours. They are not the same thing.

Because many people focus mainly on time worked as the major predictor of being overworked, they overlook other aspects of the way we work that our analyses show are, in fact, more significant predictors of being overworked than hours worked.

Particularly important is what we call lack of “focus”—or more precisely, the inability to focus on one’s work because of constant interruptions and distractions as well as excessive multi-tasking required to keep up with all that has to be done on the job.

The real culprit behind that hellish feeling of being ground into bloody pulp by all the work demanding our attention isn’t the hours we spend – it’s the way we multitask till our brains are ready to explode trying to cope with it all.

Put another way, we’re trying to keep afloat bailing the lifeboat with a leaky Styrofoam cup called Multitasking.

So maybe the key out of Overwork hell is asking the question: if we can’t multitask our way out of here, what way of working will work? Something to ponder.

 

Comments

[Matthew Cornell]

Thanks for the pointer, Bob. I'm 1/3 through CrazyBusy now, and it *is* interesting.