Coming shortly, a long, long (and possibly multi-part) screed I’m writing up about the good, the bad, and the ugly of productivity classic Getting Things Done, and how some of the ideas in the considerably more obscure British Do It Tomorrow deal with the shortcomings of the GTD approach.

In authoring that, however, I stumbled across this great quote worth sharing:

“Multitasking is the art of distracting yourself from two things you’d rather not be doing by doing them simultaneously.”

Which is dead on.

Or, at least dead on at a philosophical level. At the cognitive level, however, research has made increasingly clear that people can’t really multitask – do two tasks a the same time. Instead, they either background task – say, listen to music while working out – if one of the tasks has a very low cognitive load, or they switchtask – alternate back and forth between two different activities.

And, in short, research has also increasingly shown that each time someone alternates, they incur a bit of cognitive ‘switching cost’ – extra time spent catching back up to their place in a IM conversation, or re-reading the last few lines of an email draft after each switch.

So per the zen saying, “when you are chopping wood, chop wood; when you are carrying water, carry water.” You won’t just be more present and do both tasks better, but you’ll take considerably less time doing them than you would trying to do both at the same time.