Talking with Dave Crenshaw

Robert Richman: Hey, I’m Robert with Zappos Insights, and today we are here with Dave Crenshaw, the author of The Myth of Multitasking: How “Doing It All” Gets Nothing Done. And I’m sure everybody’s familiar with the concept of multitasking, and we’ve probably all been on the phone with somebody who’s doing several things at once, on the computer, you can hear them in the background doing those things, and at that point multitasking gets really annoying. But this whole idea that doing several things at once, doing it all gets nothing done, that’s a pretty bold concept there.

Dave Crenshaw: Right.

Robert Richman: So how did you discover that, that trying to do everything actually gets nothing done?

Dave Crenshaw: Well, I don’t know if I was the one who discovered it. The studies have been there. There are lots and lots of people who are a lot smarter than I am who have done the hard research on it. I view myself as the evangelist of the message, because the problem is, lots of people – they’ve heard the studies. Maybe they’ve seen it in the news: “Multitasking is a bad thing.” But then what happens to their behavior after that? Nothing. Nothing changes.

So what this is is really a story that brings it home into a very personal setting and helps people find personal application of that idea that – this idea, this concept that they’ve been living for so long of multitasking is just – it’s completely false. It’s getting them the opposite results of what they want.

Robert Richman: But so for those people who really believe it, who say “I can do all this at once. I can do the e-mail. I can do the phone. I’ve got so much to do. I’ve got 100 items on my to-do list. I need to be doing all these things at once. I feel productive when I’m doing all those things” – to the people who don’t believe you that multitasking is bad, what would you say?

Dave Crenshaw: Sure. Well, it’s simply a matter of math. Whenever you try to do multiple active things at the same time, what you’re really doing is jumping back and forth between the tasks. In the book I call it switch-tasking. When people are multitasking, they think they’re able to do multiple things at the same time, but physiologically, your brain is not able to handle that. So what it does is it switches back and forth rapidly. If I’m typing on an e-mail and I’m trying to talk on the phone, I’m going back and forth, and every time I do that, I’m incurring something called switching cost. That’s a term that’s usually applied to economics or finance. When you multitask or switch-task, you’re incurring lots and lots and lots of little switching costs that, when you add it all up, adds to a huge loss in productivity and a huge loss – well, a huge gain to stress and an increase of mistakes, in the workplace and in your personal life.

Robert Richman: Are there any anecdotes or stories that you’ve seen or anything out there that really drove it home to you that took the kind of the math and the statistics and the studies and made it really real?

Dave Crenshaw: Yeah. Well, there was a CEO that I was working with, and I told her this principle, and I said, “Have you ever experienced how multitasking has made you less productive?” And she said, “Oh, my gosh, that happened to me just last week. I was trying to do three things at the same time.” She was talking to her assistant, she was answering e-mail, and she was talking to someone else on the phone at the same time. Okay, so three different things. I said, “What was the result of that?” And she said, “Oh, it was horrible. Finally, the person on the other end of the line said, ‘Are you okay?’ ‘Well, yeah, I’m fine. Why?’ ‘Well, ’cause I just asked you a really important question and you didn’t say anything.’”

Now, it took this CEO one hour when she was doing all three of those things at the same time. Finally, she realized it wasn’t working, so she got up, went out into the hall, took the phone call. Took her seven minutes. She came inside, talked to her assistant. Took her three minutes. She sat down and answered the e-mail. Took her three minutes. So when she did them one at a time, she accomplished all of them successfully in just 13 minutes, but when she tried to do them all at the same time, it took her an hour, and she made a mess of all of it. And these are the kinds of things that are happening day in and day out, in the workplace, in our personal life, in our interactions with our customers, even.

Robert Richman: That’s huge.

Dave Crenshaw: Those kinds of things take place.

Robert Richman: That’s huge. Okay, so here’s the tough question, then.

Dave Crenshaw: Okay.

Robert Richman: In a company like Zappos – I’m sure other people have this kind of issue as well at their company – we’re doing a lot that’s going on. Phone calls come in. People come by on tours. Your boss comes up to you. A co-worker needs help with something. An e-mail comes in. Maybe a fire is happening that you just need to address immediately. All these kinda things are happening at the same time, and everybody wants to really be available to be able to help everyone and such.

Dave Crenshaw: Sure.

Robert Richman: What is the way that you can focus on these types of things without being rude to people, without appearing like you’re not being helpful? How can you actually take this concept, believe that multitasking isn’t good, focus, and really implement it?

Dave Crenshaw: Right. The key is to implement what I call switch-busters. I don’t know if you’re a fan of the show Mythbusters. I like watching that with my four-year-old boy. So I call these switch-busters, and what they are are ways to minimize the switches that are taking place in your day. And that’s the key is you can’t completely get rid of the interruptions. There’s no way that you can say, “I’m not going to have any emergencies today.” That’s impossible, especially in today’s society.

So what you need to do is say, “What are some strategies that I can implement to minimize the amount of switches that are going to take place, to decrease the number of interruptions that are gonna take place in my day?” And by implementing those systems, that will yield huge gains in productivity, really as sort of a set-and-forget method. I’m sure you want some examples of what those would be.

Robert Richman: That’d be great.

Dave Crenshaw: Okay, so let me just start with a basic one. E-mail notification: you don’t need it. Get rid of it. Because every time a new e-mail comes in and you hear that [Imitates e-mail notification tone] or even just the cursor changes, it’s pulling your attention away from whatever it is that you’re working on, and that’s a switch, and there’s a switching cost associated with that. So turning off the e-mail notification in favor of having a regularly scheduled time to check your e-mail is much more productive in the long run and actually allows you to serve people better. It allows you to provide better customer service because you’re able to give full attention to people when you’re responding to their e-mail, rather than trying to do it on the fly, in between all of the other things that you have going on. So that’s sort of the basic place that I would start out with.

Another thing that really makes a big difference in a corporate culture, particularly here at a place like Zappos, is implementing what I call one-to-one huddles. Now, there’s a difference between – one of the things that’s great – and I just did the tour. Okay, so I love how everybody’s interacting with each other and they’re building that teamwork. That’s not saying that you can’t have any interaction with each other outside of the huddle. The huddle is just for quick questions. It’s that someone coming up to your desk and saying, “Hey, sorry. Got a quick question.” That is a switch to what you’re doing, and it’s an interrupt in the flow. So it’s better to have a regularly scheduled time where you’re going to meet together to discuss those things. You hold off all those quick questions and then say, “Okay, go,” and you’re going through those quick questions rapidly, and you’re completely focused on each other. And there’s a manufacturing company that I worked with, and they said implementing just that one principle alone increased productivity about 30 percent.

Robert Richman: Wow. Wow. So it sounds like it’s definitely an increase in productivity, a decrease in stress.

Dave Crenshaw: Absolutely.

Robert Richman: And that really affects the culture overall.

Dave Crenshaw: Yeah. Well, and the stress – and that’s one thing that I kinda like to talk about on a personal level is the impact on relationships. Right now in society we run across so many people that, when they’re talking to us, they’re giving us half attention. They’re checking their e-mail or checking their voicemail. And it’s such a powerful opportunity when you can be the individual or even have the company culture that says “When I’m talking to you, I’m talking to you. I’m gonna focus on you 100 percent and not let anything else get in the way.” And when you can do that, you actually set yourself apart right now in today’s society. And you can take that and spill that into your relationship with children if you’ve got them, or friends. You really cement those relationships so much better when you are completely focused and not multitasking on people.

Robert Richman: Yeah, that’s great. We actually have a rule in our departments where, when we’re all meeting as a department, there is no BlackBerry kinda texting and such like that going on.

Dave Crenshaw: I love it.

Robert Richman: And it’s really –

Dave Crenshaw: Fantastic.

Robert Richman: What we wanna do with Insights is share a lot of these little things that you can do that creates the larger culture and these kinda little things that improve the culture but also, as Dave is pointing out here, saves us time and creates a lot of productivity in the long run.

So the book’s called The Myth of Multitasking by Dave Krenshaw. You can pick it up on Amazon.com or –

Dave Crenshaw: Yup. Amazon.com, absolutely, and any major retailer. Sure.

Robert Richman: Great, great. Well, thanks for being with us today.

Dave Crenshaw: Thank you very much.

Robert Richman: And thanks for checking us out here on Zappos Insights. Feel free to leave comments here on your own tricks in terms of how you’ve dealt with multitasking, and we’d love to hear them.