I returned from holiday to the office yesterday to find screenfuls of emails, a desk buried under post, most of my colleagues out of the office — and a report in The New York Times about the dangers of “multitasking”.
I knew all about the last already. I phoned an executive in our advertising department recently. She wasn’t there, and I asked her colleague to take a message. He spelt my Christian and surname wrongly, wrote my phone number back to front — and then emailed the message to me rather than her. When I pointed this out, he said: “Yeah, I must have been trying to do two things at once.”