Why Multitasking Makes Us Less Human

A powerful buzzword for the past few years has been multitasking. I'm not sure where the word originated. I think it might have come from the world of computers and originally meant a computer that was performing two functions at once. Just as words such as interface entered the lexicon as computer terminology and transferred to humanity--for a while, business people didn't talk, only interfaced--so too multitasking began to apply to people who could do two or more tasks at once.

I have two questions about the concept of human multitasking: one, can we do it well? I think not, at least not often. Oh, sure, we can eat chips and use the remote at the same time. We can walk and talk on our cell phones. On a good day, we can even drive and talk on our cell phones. But even when we do two basic tasks at the same time, one generally takes precedence over the over. You drop a chip on the couch. So what? You jerk to a stop to keep from stepping into the road before you look for traffic. Then, while you check traffic, you lose track of your conversation and have to ask your BFF to repeat what she just said. No big deal.

How does this work when the tasks become more complicated? You put the document at work into the wrong folder and it takes an hour to find it a week later. You keep asking colleagues or assistants to repeat what they said because you were checking your emails while you talked to them, and, as we know, the human mind cannot comprehend two linguistic threads at once. We half do and we half hear, and yet human resource managers keep putting "must be able to multitask" on job descriptions, and we all swear up and down that we are, without a doubt, the greatest multitaskers in the world.

But doing half or all of what we do poorly because we don't focus isn't the worst result of our obsession with multitasking. It's how inhuman it's made us all. The word itself, like interface before it, encourages us to think of ourselves as machines: we compute, we multitask, we interface--we do everything but what humans are supposed to do, which is relate.

We should not check our emails when someone is talking to us. We should listen. We should care enough about people to give them uninterrupted time. We should turn off the cell phones while we eat lunch or dinner with family or friends. We should listen when people talk to us. Did I mention that one already?

What does all of this multitasking do to us in the long run? It exhausts us. From what I've seen, most people can multitask for a while, to get the big project out or cook dinner and help the kids with their homework. Young people can do it better than older people because they have more energy and have grown up  surrounded with media. In the long run, though, anyone who does two or ten things at the same time becomes so focused on action that they cease to take time to ponder and think and engage on all of the activities that computers can't do. And those are the things that make us and keep us content and centered.