Published:

02/26/2014 08:05pm

Is it better to focus on one task, or doing multiple jobs at once?

In theory, it might be healthier and more productive to focus on one thing at a time, since lack of concentration poisons talent. But in actual life there are seldom situations in which you can actually concentrate on only one thing. Most of the time, most human beings must be multitasking, circumstances force us to. And the main reason is that at several stages of any activity you must wait for input by other persons. For instance, writing an article that requires an external answer by someone. You would not just sit back and wait: you would perform other tasks. In this innocent way, forced multitasking begins, and soon you will have tenths or maybe hundred open projects running parallel. It is as cooking with hundred pots at a time.

In my profession (music): imagine you prepare for a concert. You practice your instrument, you decide and write down the programme, send it to the venue along with some pictures, and do some interview with a journalist. But you also initiate contacts for the concerts after that one. So your daily practice for concert "A" would be interspersed with phone calls and mails exchange with the organisers of concert "B". And I am just simplifying extremely.

So, multitasking might be annoying but we must learn to cope with it in order to survive. An excellent musical example is counterpoint: the Baroque composition technique consisting of several melodies running at the same time, while building a coherent, consistent whole (Bach & Co.). If we can't achieve an ability for "life counterpoint", we might get very frustrated.

This musical example allows us another allegory: how many parallel melodies can I recognise simultaneously? Two, five? So that's my perception limit and I wouldn't be able to perceive more melodies at the same time, except that I train hard (and there will be anyway a limit, somewhere). In everyday life (everyday for non-musicians, of course): how many open projects can I run, how many tasks can I perform simultaneously? Two, five? That's my limit and if I go beyond it, if I cross the line, I might collapse. So know your limit and don't transgress it. Alternatively (or rather parallely): learn to expand your limits.

Having said that, indispensable is also the complementary ability: being able to stop everything and concentrate on one thing while forgetting -filtering- the rest of the world for a time. If not, you would experiment the usual symptom of performing task A and feeling guilty because you are not doing B, so switching to task B and feeling guilty because of not doing task A. You must avoid this short circuit as pest. This vicious circle is the enemy, not multitasking.

Juan María Solare (pianist, composer)
www.JuanMariaSolare.com