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The books-on-the-nightstand syndrome
Well, I should know better. Multi-tasking is not productive. We should avoid it.
After all, the protagonist of my most recent book “Be Fast Or Be Gone”, Mike Knight, explains to a group of scientists why it is better to focus on the task at hand instead of multitasking. He uses the books-on-the-nightstand syndrome as an example. Here is how he expresses his view, “Say I have ten books to read, each with two hundred pages. If I read twenty pages per day and I multitask, I’ll have read twenty pages of each book after ten days of reading. And I probably don’t have a clue what’s happening in any of them. After twenty days, I’ll be forty pages into each book, and I’ll finish them all somewhere between days ninety-one and one-hundred. And since I don’t have a perfect memory, in all likelihood, I will have to go back and remind myself of what I’ve read. Going back over material I’ve already read is what I call switching costs. Switching costs in the real world can be even higher. They can easily make up twenty to thirty percent of the whole task. But, if I read in a focused way, I will have read all of my first book by day ten, I will finish my second book on day twenty. At the end of day ninety I will have read nine out of ten books and be ready to start my tenth. I won’t have any redundant reading to do. I won’t have any switching costs.”
There you have it. In the book, the group of scientists were convinced to apply focus on their own tasks going forward. The story goes on from there. And no, I won’t reveal more :)
I got called out on the books-on-the-nightstand example. A friend of mine asked me how I handle this for myself. I had to admit that I didn’t have fewer books on my personal nightstand during or even after I wrote the book. A quick inventory check resulted in a couple of Grisham thrillers, the project management handbook PMBOK (I read that when I really cannot find sleep), a training guide on taekwondo, the Heath brother’s “Made to stick”, Sarah Skwire’s “Writing with a Thesis” and there is the iPad with its endless possibilities. In other words – I am guilty.
And, I am not alone. I stumbled upon a dialog on “Library Thing“. One of the members asked the question of how many books people were reading in parallel. The result is unsurprisingly clear. Most people read more than one book at a time. Some have as many as ten books in parallel “in the works”. Clearly, the book reading multitasker were in the majority. So, is single tasking for book reading impossible in the real life?
Well, not so fast. A blog from Matthew Cornell suggests a system for reading lots of books in a short period time. Here is how the system goes:
“In a nutshell, he says he reads the book four times:
- Table of contents, glossary, index.
- Anything in bold, titles, and subtitles.
- First line of every paragraph.
- Entire book
Here’s the twist: Steps 1-3 should only take about 10 minutes. To capture relevant information he uses a note-taking scheme involving putting dots in margins, and cross-referencing them in an index in the book’s front. When done, he transfers them to a text file.”
Mike Knight would have been happy to meet Matthew Cornell. I am sure that they would get along just fine. Having that said, my personal nightstand never will be much smaller than it is right now. That’s because the books on there are for fun. For job-related reading I am recommend-ing Mike’s/Matthew’s approach. In short: multitasking book reading like zapping through TV channels is for fun. If professional efficiency is called for we are better off relentlessly applying single focus.
