Some people can wash dishes while caring for a baby and in the background think about the class that they’re going to teach the next day and ways of making it more interesting for the students. Other people would first wash the dishes and then sit down and plan lessons and then deal with the baby.

It doesn’t seem to make much of a difference except for the additional amount of time that is spent. Except for one problem. What happens when you’re in the middle of doing the dishes and the baby cries? That means that a person who cannot multi-task stops doing the dishes, dries her hands, and goes over the baby. After the baby is happy again the person is lost because she’s out of the mode of handling the baby. She may not even remember what she had been doing previously. She has to get her bearings and start doing something. When she starts doing something it might not necessarily be the dishes. It could be anything else that needs doing or sometimes it just might be filling up time because she forgot about the need to go back to the dishes in the first place. At the end of the day only some of those dishes got washed, much less got done, and she wonders where her time went.

There are many courses that are offered around the world in time management. Many of them deal with methods of being efficient and methods of using your multi-tasking abilities more effectively.

Unfortunately, these courses usually do not deal with the fact that some people switch tasks and some people are multi-taskers and this does make a problem. It means that they have to learn more than just project management or learning to be efficient. It means that they have to learn how to rewire themselves so that they can do multi-tasking rather than simply doing task switching. Until this “rewiring” takes place any talk about efficiency may be lost or may not be sufficiently helpful.

Computers can be taught to multi-task. Can people?

The answer is yes, but the question is whether it is a positive or good thing to do so.

Multi-tasking people and task switching people have two different ways of working. By changing the basic way in which a person works which can be done, there are going to be numerous side effects. The decision that will have to be made is whether it is worth making such a major change in the very nature of the person or whether it is best to accept the task switching person as she is and working with this limitation.

In most cases of this type the latter form is preferable.