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BusinessWorld.com: Multitasking Is A Big Waste Of Time

Interview Srikumar S. Rao
May 29, 2010
URL: http://www.businessworld.in/bw/2010_05_29_Multitasking_Is_A_Big_Waste_Of_Time.html

Srikumar S. Rao has unusual ideas about how people can have more fulfilling lives. Among his beliefs: there is no separation between our professional and personal selves, and positive thinking can actually harm you. Positive thinking is so enshrined in our culture that knocking it is a little like attacking motherhood or apple pie. People swear by positive thinking and quite a few have been helped by it. Nevertheless, it is not effective. Rao explains that positive thinking implies there is negative thought — so a person has to work harder to banish the negative and do the positive. And it is a set up for failure. Uttara Choudhury caught up with the maverick professor in New York to tap more of his thoughts. Excerpts:

You urge executives to stop labelling events as bad. How does this help?

When something comes at you from the left field, you make a snap judgement and label the event as a bad thing. When you label what happens as bad, it guarantees that you will experience it as bad. If you keep a neutral mindset, there will be no emotional toll, and you are far more likely to come up with some course of action.

My book talks about a 23-year-old Baltimore man who slipped on a patch of ice and broke his wrist. He was a swimmer, and the injury kept him on the sidelines for weeks. By anyone’s standards, a broken wrist sounds like bad news. But this determined young man didn’t want his years of training to fall by the wayside so he spent hours kicking at the wall while his teammates practised furiously. Later, at the swimming meet he was practising for, he won by a hundredth of a second.

High-speed photos at the end of the men’s 100-metre butterfly final in the Beijing Olympics show Michael Phelps was still kicking while his opponent’s legs were trailing. Those weeks at the side of the pool gave Phelps the extra muscle he needed. It got him his seventh gold medal. It is clear from Phelps’ story that a broken wrist wasn’t a ‘bad thing’. If you resist labelling things as bad, you find lurking possibilities.

Be like a civil engineer. When he builds a road and encounters a swamp, he doesn’t rail at it. He figures out how to get his road built over or around it. If you don’t stick a ‘bad thing’ label on stuff that happens to you, you will get a lot more work done.

Curiously, you have also advised people not to label things as good.

Now we are getting very philosophical. I always ask people to be generous with labelling events as good, but niggardly with the bad thing label. If you are always sticking labels, you get stuck in exulting at good things and lamenting bad things. This leads to constant mood swings, which are emotionally draining. If you avoid this, then you get to a point where you are on an even keel.

Remember Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’. He says; “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs… If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.” That would be an ideal state to reach, but most of us are far from there, so till we achieve it, we should be generous with good, and niggardly with bad.

Why do you advise executives to be Daruma dolls?

A Daruma doll is modelled after monk Bodhidharma, who founded Zen. Have you seen a Daruma doll? It is a hollow, armless and legless doll with a heavy, wide bottom. Knock it down, it instantly springs back. In fact, you can’t really keep it down.

How does one survive in a workplace roiled by layoffs?

People feel insecure because they are projecting into the future. What if I am sacked? In minutes, they have aggravated themselves by creating scenarios where they don’t have money, can’t pay the mortgage, etc.

We can learn from US Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell who was wounded and isolated behind enemy lines after a mission in Afghanistan went awry. He survived, thanks to the Special Ops training that includes the Hell Week. The majority of recruits drop out after this tough training. You run 10 miles on the beach and then are told to swim up to two miles in the ocean. You think you have 10 minutes to eat breakfast and are told, “Sorry change of plans; you have two minutes.” You are bleary from lack of sleep, and are doing live fire exercises. If you think, “I have four more days of this hell,” you will drop out. People like Luttrell survive by concentrating on the next step. One needs to prevent one’s thoughts from straying — stay in the ‘now’.

What do you tell executives who say they can’t manage their time?

Let me put it bluntly: you don’t need to manage time better. You need to manage yourself better. Executives should be ‘mindful’. The problem is people lack the discipline to focus their elemental faculties on the task in front of them. They pay dearly for that.

Set aside blocks of time from 25 to 30 minutes to get a task completed. During that time don’t let e-mail, chats or the BlackBerry distract you. If you cultivate the habit of ‘mindfulness’, you get into flow much faster. You get productive and things get done faster.

Unfortunately, our society is dragging us in the opposite direction as companies say they like executives to multitask. Multitasking is for the birds. It is a tremendous time waster. Research has shown that a limited amount of attention can be deployed to any one task at any one time. Knock off the tasks one by one.

Have you observed oil being poured from a container? There are no bubbles or ripples just a smooth flow. When you have a task, that needs to be done just be like that. Pour your energy into it, concentrate, and things will flow.

Are you a technology minimalist?

I am not. But I believe you have to use it with discretion. You can’t become a slave to your smartphone. Often, we get obsessed with technology instead of using it as a tool.

Why do you encourage executives to read the likes of P.G. Wodehouse, books on Zen and quantum physics, and so on?

I have a huge reading list that includes A Search In Secret India by Paul Brunton and Leave It To Psmith by Wodehouse. I ask people to evaluate the mental models used by Psmith, and his insouciance when faced with the slings of outrageous fortune.

Then there is FLOW: The Psychology Of Optimal Experience by (Hungarian psychologist) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He talks about FLOW being a state of intense absorption where the distinction between you and your work disappears. Hours feel like minutes. Peak performers achieve this state. It has been studied in champion athletes as well as artistes. I make everyone read a lot of books as we get stuck in mental ruts. These books shake you free. Every executive should read them before their first meeting.

(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 07-06-2010)

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