This week, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art start a new series on ProductivityCast, BookCast, to discuss books in time management-related genres. To start us off, we’re discussing The Myth of Multitasking, Second Edition by Dave Crenshaw.

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In this Cast | BookCast: The Myth of Multitasking

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | BookCast: The Myth of Multitasking

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

BookCast: The Myth of Multitasking, Second Edition by Dave Crenshaw

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, PhD

Rube Goldberg machine

bricolage

MacGyver

Raw Text Transcript

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Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17Hello, and welcome to ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:22I'm Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:24And I'm Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen. And welcome to our listeners to today's episode. Today, we are doing our second book caste, book discussions on books that we are reading and we wanted to share what we are reading with you today we are discussing the Myth of Multitasking how doing it all gets nothing done the second edition by Dan Crenshaw, he has written several books on productivity. But most notably, he has written and produced several courses on lynda.com, now known as LinkedIn learning, and that is the Microsoft owned company, LinkedIn, LinkedIn learning and the lynda.com platform. So if you ever go to LinkedIn learning or lynda.com, and you look at any of the productivity courses there, they're likely done by Dan Crenshaw. And so he has written this book this, do we call this an allegory or a fable of Helen and Phil, Phil being a productivity consultant that has come into this company to help out GREENGUARD with their productivity, specifically, the CEO, Helen, what did you guys think of the book? What were your ideas that initially kind of after finishing the book you thought about, and then then we can get into the kind of particulars of what Phil is really trying to portray here. What Crenshaw is trying to portray here through the character of Phil,

Augusto Pinaud 1:40another book was a really enjoyable I agree on on the issues of multitasking and the problems of lack of attention and lack of focus. So I, I think, for many people who think that they can be to certain degrees effective multitasking, it's important to understand what Crusher coal, by ground tasking, you know, that you can drive and listen music and versus actually when you need to put attention on the work and what is the cost of not putting the right attention to this to these tasks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:20He did attempt to bring a couple of new definitions to the world, I have frequently called what he was calling back tasking or background tasking. As meta tasking, that is something that is layered. And back ground or back tasking just didn't seem right, to me is the right term, I spent a lot of time thinking about this. And so the idea of kind of habit stacking, or these other terms that tend to muddle what is actually happening is, I think counter to my own productivity, when I think about it in those terms, they just don't make sense. If we are doing two tasks at once, one that doesn't require our full attention, and can be done either by a machine or simultaneously like having a conversation and driving while not is not the safest thing in the world can be done, or texting and driving, which is not safe and should not be done. Either. There are different standards of what can be done. And so this idea of back tasking, or background tasking, just didn't seem to stick with me as a term. But I recognize that it happens that we do it. And that it can actually be a very useful mechanism for time management,

Art Gelwicks 3:29the concept of back tasking to me as a rationalization within the book. I mean, it's it's talking about pushing something to an alternative system. Let's say you've got a video that you've edited, and it needs to render. So you're going to let the system render while you take some calls. That's fine, but you're not doing the work. And that's where I think it becomes a misnomer. And it actually undermines this whole concept of getting away from multitasking because we're talking about something else going on, but you're not actually doing it. So why even kid yourself that you're doing it, you're starting something off and running. This is delegation, you just happen to be delegating to an automated system. So I don't know, I think it's an unnecessary addition. And it clutters the concept.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:14Yeah, I think you could take the example of doing laundry while watching a television show. So there is a facilitated part here, which is that the washing machine and the dryer are going to do the bulk majority of the work but say that you're folding your clothes, or putting your clothes on hangers while watching the show. That's where you are in essence, you have your attention primarily on one activity where you're consuming something while still being able to do the other activity which is folding the clothes. I don't differentiate the fact that a machine is doing some level of the work like you said, you know, get video rendering and you go and do something else. You're still having to manage. If you're if you're managing the activity, then I consider you doing it. And so that's kind of how I've pieced those two pieces to So I, it's interesting because you're, you're differentiating that which is machine facilitated work. And that that you're managing and action based work that you're actually doing yourself manually. That's an interesting delineation.

Art Gelwicks 5:13See, but I would also challenge the the idea, the consuming example, because, to me, there's a difference between active and passive consuming. And if you are doing something like folding your laundry, you're passively consuming whatever it is that you know is on the TV, because for periods of time be ever they how short, you have to disconnect from that to make sure you actually fold the thing in front of you. So for that block of time, you're not engaged, you're not doing that other thing, which is that passive absorption of whatever's going on, you're not taking notes, you're not capturing details, you're not processing the information, it's just kind of floating in the background. So and I find myself doing the same thing, if I'm working on a project, and I decided, Oh, I'll play an audio book. While I'm doing this, too. It doesn't take me very long to recognize the fact that I'm getting very little value out of that audio book at that point, because I'm not focused on that. It's background, it's, yeah, I might absorb something, but it's not an effective use of the dual task. If I if I want value out of something, it requires focus. And that's, again, this is where I struggle with this a little bit, because it does make sense to me to take things that do not require my focus, and I do not need to drive personal engagement to get the value out of to some other things, whether mechanical, personal or otherwise, but simultaneously doing things. And it just flat out doesn't work. I mean, his definite, his reference to what he often we refer to as time slicing, you know, jumping back and forth between things, I think is a much more accurate representation of this. With that

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:49I'm gonna, I'm gonna snap us back to the beginning of the book, and start from the beginning of the book, which is, it is called The Myth of Multitasking. And we find fill in this narrative, where he is a productivity consultant. And he comes and meets Helen, the CEO of green garb. And as he is introduced to her, she is harried and dealing with multiple people in her office, and finally makes time to sit down with Phil, and then they are capable of having a conversation about her current time and task management. And what did you think let's just start at the very top of the chart in terms of multitasking, as he defined it, the idea of multitasking generally, how we've considered it and thought about it in society and work culture over the past several decades, because it is a fairly new invention. And we can kind of go from there. You know, there's a there's a story here. So let's stick to the narrative. And we can kind of make our way through the different pieces, perhaps. But what did you think about the presentation of the material of multitasking, and I'll just start with the fact that he basically posits that multitasking is a myth,...