[kelric]

Originally Posted by INTJMom

I was recently asked this question on a pre-interview questionnaire.

"There are times when multi-tasking is necessary between ongoing day to day work and special circumstances that require press coverage or other activity. How would you describe your ability to focus on more than one task at a time without sacrificing quality in your work?"

Is there a personality type that can pull this off? What type is it?

I find it hard to believe that it's actually humanly possible, probably because I am a perfectionist.
I can multi-task but the quality of the work is going to suffer a little.
How can it not?!
I know that "multi-tasking" is the buzzword out there.
I just don't believe it's possible to do both - multi-task AND not let the quality of your work suffer.
Or am I the only one who has trouble with this?

I think you're right... in fact, I'm almost positive. You can task-switch between multiple things, but the quality *will* suffer. Not much doubt about it - I ran into a book discussing this the other day in the bookstore (can't remember the title ), and basically it said that it's a neurological fact - there is degradation of quality, response time, etc. when trying to juggle multiple tasks, be they mental or physical. You'll tend to prioritize them, and spend more time and effort on the more important one, but performance of both will suffer. Now if they're both trivial, you may be fine anyway (the old "walk and chew gum at the same time" thing), but for anything that takes effort it's just not possible to do two things as well as one. I don't think personality type really has much to do with it.

In my somewhat cynical opinion, this question really means "tell me that you can do multiple things perfectly at once, so that, if hired, I can pile multiple things on you and interrupt you constantly, and then blame you if you can't handle it all flawlessly."

I'm not sure how I'd answer this question (which, like you say, is sort of a buzzword-bingo thing anyway). Either make up a bunch of BS (probably what most people do), or approach it at the level of prioritization - knowing what's important to focus on at any given moment, with the understanding that true simultaneous focus isn't possible. Explain things like how you might allocate time to focus on different things throughout the day, or how you might handle an interruption almost immediately, but after taking a few short notes on what you were focusing on pre-interruption so that you can get back to it easily later.

I believe that it also changes as you age... younger people (early 20's ish) tend to be better at juggling multiple things, but older people tend to be better at prioritizing. I know that I'm very, very annoyed when I'm trying to focus on something and I get interrupted by someone wanting something (which happens a lot at work). My tendency is to want to say, "shut up and leave me alone and let me finish what I'm doing!" (although I never do). That might be a personality thing .

But enough rambling... short answer... I think you're right .