AT&T’s “Multi-task to the Max” is the worst slogan ever
I was minding my own business on LinkedIn when AT&T’s ad popped up. It shows a woman getting several things done at once, including eating potato chips. The tag-line: “Multi-task to the Max.”
This is a terrible and disgusting message.
Multi-tasking is evil
People who try to do two or more things at once will do them all poorly.
How do you feel about people who aren’t paying attention during a meeting and can’t answer questions about what’s happening?
Or people who type emails while working on other problems and get key details wrong or leave them out?
Do you enjoy food that you eat while working — or does it disappear without you even noticing or enjoying it?
Maybe you’re a fan of people who use social media on their phones while driving. I’m not.
Multi-tasking is a symptom of deeper problems. It swallows all of us in a workplace where no one is fully paying attention. That generates poor work, miserable people, and restentment.
Multi-tasking is bad for you and bad for your work.
Shame on AT&T for celebrating it.
Do this instead
Set aside blocks of time for creative work. Concentrate. Enter a flow state. Remember how that feels. Make pursuing it a top goal.
Eat without working. Enjoy your food. Even 15 minutes of eating rather than working is a break that will benefit your brain.
Don’t call meetings when emails would do. Get excused from meetings that you don’t need to attend. If you’re in charge, make a it a priority to reduce meetings. (The best work cultures I’ve ever seen circulate carefully written memos for comment to make decisions, eliminating most meetings altogether.)
Call out multi-taskers in meetings. Don’t put up with it.
And join me in denigrating advertisers who celebrate it.
There are plenty of ways to promote fast internet without telling people to “Multi-task to the Max.” Just stop.
We all multi-task or task switch. If we could not, life would look very much different than it does. Very.
Yes, flow/in-da-zone is amazing for many things, but that is not a reason to hate multi-tasking.
Meeting multiplication is evil, but a tangent.
Recognizing when what is required or desirable is a skill worth learning. Adapting might be the closest to a “secret to” leadership as it gets. That and balancing are certainly foundational.
Stereotyping is certainly a key factor in so many bad failures.
Well said! Multi-tasking has never seemed comfortable – or useful – to me.
I have had 4 books published, received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Storytelling Network, and, best of all, supported myself as a freelance storyteller and storytelling coach for over 50 years. For me, multitasking is only justified if you are the only person left on a sinking boat and need to navigate, repair the boat, and call for help at the same time. And even then, it may be better to do each of those in turn, rather than simultaneously.
Doug
When piloting a plane during an emergency, multitasking can be deadly.
According to Wikipedia “A core principle of airmanship taught to student pilots is “Aviate, Navigate, Communicate”, to remind them of priorities during an emergency. The highest priority is to keep the aircraft flying, avoiding loss of control or controlled flight into terrain. Next, the pilot(s) should verify their location and navigate toward a suitable destination. Communication with air traffic control or other planes is the lowest priority.
Tom
Multitasking is a myth. All you do is task-switching and it has been proven that it detracts from the tasks you are doing.
It is not essential that you are in the flow to do something, but it is essential that you DO pay it 100% attention. Otherwise, you may find yourself having to go back to it and redo.
Basically: focus.
multi-tasking/task-switching is essential to living. Distraction is an essential part of focus. No one is in the 100% attention area, thank goodness. Flow is amazing in tasks that allow one to lose oneself. Most of life is not that.