MT302 Unit 6 Multitasking Seminar Reflection Example

Forty-Seven Switches in Two Days: An MT302 Unit 6 Seminar Reflection on the Office Habit of Praising Multitaskers

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

MT302: Organizational Behavior

Unit 6 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The seminar, office and log are composite; the studies cited are real.

The Belief

In our office, a good coordinator "juggles." New hires are praised for answering the phone mid-package, replying to agents while checking figures and switching to whichever file is loudest. I believed it too: I saw switching as a skill and the people who did it fastest as the best at the job.

The Session

The seminar asked us to test a management belief against evidence, and I offered this one. A classmate who works as a dispatcher pushed back hard: switching is the whole job, he said, and anyone who cannot switch cannot dispatch. The discussion turned on a distinction he forced us to make. People can alternate between tasks quickly, but they do not perform two demanding tasks at the same moment. What we call multitasking is usually fast switching. The question became not whether switching is necessary, since in both our jobs it is, but what each switch costs.

What the Research Says

After the session, I read two studies. Rubinstein et al. (2001) measured, under controlled conditions, how much slower people were when moving from one task to a different one than when staying on the same task, and found the delay grew with the tasks' complexity. The tasks were artificial, so the findings may not transfer directly to office work. Mark et al. (2008) studied people doing office tasks with and without interruptions and found that interrupted workers completed tasks faster but reported more stress, frustration and time pressure. The sample was small, and the tasks were short. Robbins and Judge (2019) describe stress as rising when demands exceed resources, and switching consumes one resource, attention, that coordinators need most.

Juggling looks like skill from across the room, but each catch costs a little attention, and the bill comes due on the hardest task.

My Own Two Days

To see what this meant for my job, I kept a log for two days after the session, noting each time I switched from one task to another and why. I counted forty-seven switches. Most were harmless: a phone call during filing, an email between packages. Three happened in the middle of verifying wire instructions, the task where a mistake can send a family's down payment to a criminal. Each time, I had to restart the verification from the beginning, and once I realized afterward that I had skipped the callback step. Nothing went wrong, but the log showed me that my most important task was the one I was least protecting.

What the Log Did Not Show

The log also showed something I had not expected. Many of the forty-seven switches were my own choice, not interruptions from others. I opened email between steps of a package because a small task felt like relief from a large one. The research I read focused on interruptions from outside, but my log suggests that self-interruption is part of the habit too. The office's praise for juggling may reward people for breaking off their own hardest work, not only for handling other people's demands.

I also noticed that the dispatcher's point holds in a different way for coordinators. His switches are the job: each call is a new task. Mine are often switches away from the job, from one long, careful task to a short, easy one. The same word, multitasking, covers both, and the seminar's distinction helped me see that they are not the same. I came into the session ready to defend the juggling habit and left thinking the habit needs a boundary around the one task that cannot afford it.

What Changed

I no longer think switching is a skill to praise without qualification. It is a necessity to manage. The dispatcher was right that our jobs require it; the research was right that it costs. The habit of praising jugglers hides that cost, and it encourages new coordinators to treat interruptions as proof of competence.

Two colleagues I mentioned this to were skeptical at first. One said the office would grind to a halt if coordinators stopped answering. The other asked how long a wire check takes. When I said about fifteen minutes, she agreed that fifteen minutes of silence was not much to ask for the step that protects the largest sums we handle.

One Protected Task

I proposed to our office manager that wire verification be treated as a protected task: the coordinator verifying wires puts the phone on do-not-disturb, closes email and finishes the check before switching. It takes about fifteen minutes per closing. She agreed to try it for a month, and I will track whether any wire verification is interrupted.

References

Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: More speed and stress. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 107-110. https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357072

Robbins, S. P., & Judge, T. A. (2019). Organizational behavior (18th ed.). Pearson.

Rubinstein, J. S., Meyer, D. E., & Evans, J. E. (2001). Executive control of cognitive processes in task switching. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27(4), 763-797. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.27.4.763