How to multi-task effectively — lessons from playing tennis with two balls

We all multi-task, that is, do more than one task at a time. If those two things are, say, riding as a passenger, alone, on a train, while doing email, then multi-tasking is great. Multitasking can be more productive than the alternative, and, for some of us, a great technology-enabled alternative to spending our time ‘less productively.’ If those two tasks are, say, driving an SUV, while conducting a stressful cell phone call, with that cell phone held to our ear by one of our ‘driving hands’, with four screaming children in the back, and driving up to a complicated intersection with lots of traffic and poor visibility, that’s obviously a different story as far as the appropriateness and impact of multi-tasking. I see several SUVs like that daily, coming in the opposite direction. Scary. Most of us agree with HallowellIn Ned Hallowell’s recent book, CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Handling Your Fast-Paced Life, Ned summaries as follows, at the end of chapter 5: When what you are doing is important, multitasking is a practice to be avoided. Just think of it as playing tennis with two balls.
Many of us either praise or vilify multitasking. We praise it for the real or perceived performance boost we enjoy. We vilify it especially when others are rude to us in human communication. The multitasker is turning away from our interaction, 1:1 or a group meeting, or a teleconference (where participants are invisible to eachother). Or, the multitasker is creating a hazard for all of us as in the SUV example above. Both situations are very common. You might think these behaviors are critical for us to address as leaders and managers.I like the tennis with two balls analogy. When the speed, gravity and elasticity of any of our tasks (i.e. one of the tennis balls) is sensitive, one task can and should take all of our attention. The Human MomentThe human moment is one such example, defined as people's physical presence, combined with their emotional and intellectual attention. Hallowell has described this phenomena in HBR ten years ago: ... technological changes--mainly voice mail and e-mail--have made a lot of face-to-face interaction unnecessary. Face-to-face contact has also fallen victim to "virtuality"--many people work at home or are otherwise off-site. ... The bottom line is that the strategic use of the human moment adds color to our lives and helps us build confidence and trust at work. We ignore it at our peril. The other end of the spectrum is solitary desk work. I’m often, by necessity, working on multiple projects, because calendaring, reference content access (aka googling), and async messaging safely allow me and us to separate and freeze either or both of those tennis balls when concentration requires me to stop multitasking. Much of the movement to large monitors and/or multiple monitors seems to provide evidence that I have a lot of company juggling tasks in this way. Are we, as leaders and managers, accountable for the quality of multitasking in our organizations?