Stop multitasking. Start multifunctioning.
Let's have a discussion about multitasking, and possibly a better way, multifunctioning.
In recent jobs, there has been a growing demand for employees who can multitask. So is it good?
I believe the latest pandemic changes many ways we work including the shift to hybrid and remote work arrangements. In many years, I rarely see the demand of having people with multitasking as a skill, but now I see plenty of them around.
I used to be a person with multitasking in mind, just because I couldn't stop doing that until I did. To me it causes bad more than good.
Why good?
It helps us pretend we are doing more than we actually can do. It makes us feel more valuable at work.
Why bad?
Multitasking is distracting. I see a lot of colleagues coding, listening to a summary of movie while they are inside a meeting. I can easily see that they are doing at least 3 things at a time. The question is, after the meeting, will they produce good code, understand the meaning of the movie, or even know what happened in the meeting? I bet not fully.
Multitasking slows you down. You can test it using a time counter to see how long to complete a coding challenge with and without watching a YouTube video. I am quite sure that it will slow you down.
Remember that multitasking not only slows human activity down but it also reduces computation of machine as well, if you know you know :).
So what is the alternative way of looking a candidate during this time? I tried to find words to describe the alternative, but I came up with a different concept. I am not sure if this word is in a correct format, but it would be multifunctioning instead of multitasking.
Curious? What is multifunctioning? I imagine that you rarely see this word or never got an eye on it. To me, multi-functioning is the way to you contribute to your work using many skills. I have experienced a lot of colleagues tend to deny to do frontend job inside their team while they are backend developers or other the way. People could listen to music while coding in a meeting session but they don't like to do other stuffs out of their expertise or their comfort zone.
To be more productive, stop multitasking in meetings and focus on completing them as quickly as possible. Then, you can come back to coding. In the meantime, it would enhance your skillset in many ways if you accept that you can perform multifunctioning rather than sticking with what skills you have.
A multifunctioning employee might be a backend engineer who is also skilled in frontend and mobile, trust me I am not talking about fullstack developers. This employee could contribute to their team in a variety of ways, such as by developing a complete application across web and mobile.
In conclusion, multifunctioning is a more effective way to work than multitasking. By focusing on one task at a time and completing it to the best of your ability, you can be more productive and produce higher quality work. If you are looking for a way to improve your performance, I encourage you to start by multitasking less and multifunctional more.