What is Multi-Tasking?
Published: Wednesday, April 25, 2007
When we interview an organization to understand their hiring challenges, the most commonly mentioned concern is how to measure multi-tasking competency during the staffing cycle. A short discussion to define multi-tasking usually follows. To detail and expand upon the basic definition of multi-tasking, we present a summary from a client job analysis and comments from two academic papers.
A job analysis is typically developed and used in best-practice implementations of pre-employment testing systems. Job analysis requires interviewing subject matter experts who perform the job daily and subject matter experts who manage others who perform the job. Based on the information gathered from these interviews, a complete and detailed picture of the job emerges and competencies most critical to the job may be identified.
The job analysis report we reference first defines multi-tasking as follows:
Multi-Tasking: Processes information quickly and manages several tasks simultaneously
Next, sample task items are listed:
· Simultaneously asks questions, listens for information, responds to the customer, and enters data and notes into the system, to complete the call within transaction time targets. · Navigates efficiently between legacy systems, reservation systems, Internet, and Outlook, to access information quickly.
· Checks email regularly for updates.
· Works efficiently in order to complete up to 150 calls per day.
· Completes documentation while on the call, if possible, to make the most effective use of work time.
Academic works further analyze multi-tasking. In an article published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology – Human Perception and Performance, Rubenstein, Meyer, and Evans state:
Whether people toggle between browsing the Web and using other computer programs, talk on cell phones while driving, pilot jumbo jets or monitor air traffic, they’re using their “executive control” processes — the mental CEO — found to be associated with the brain’s prefrontal cortex and other key neural regions such as the parietal cortex. These interrelated cognitive processes establish priorities among tasks and allocate the mind’s resources to them. “For each aspect of human performance — perceiving, thinking and acting — people have specific mental resources whose effective use requires supervision through executive mental control,” says Meyer.The researchers say their results suggest that executive control involves two distinct, complementary stages: goal shifting (”I want to do this now instead of that“) and rule activation (”I’m turning off the rules for that and turning on the rules for this“). Both stages help people unconsciously switch between tasks.
Writing for the United States Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, Susan C. Fischer and Patricia D. Mautone provide the following chart of cognitive and personality variables that influence multi-tasking.
| Cognitive Variables | Personality |
| Attention allocation strategy | Complacency potential |
| Baseline arousal levels | Conscientiousness |
| Ability to coordinate information | Coping style |
| Divided attention | Decisiveness |
| Fluid intelligence | Impulsivity |
| Inhibition | Locus of control |
| Interval timing ability | Mastery orientation |
| Managing large sets of data | Openness to experience |
| Mental set switching speed | Organization |
| Motor response speed | Performance orientation |
| Perceptual accuracy & discrimination | Risk tasking |
| Perceptual processing speed | Tolerance for high intensity activities |
| Planning | Tolerance of ambiguity |
| Prioritization | Trait anxiety |
| Prospective memory | Type A behavior pattern factors |
| Reasoning about abstract concepts | Achievement strivings |
| Recognizing abstract relationships | Impatience/irritability |
| Retrospective memory | Polychronicity |
| Selective attention | Sense of time urgency |
| Situational awareness | |
| Working memory capacity & updating |
