Let’s go ahead and lay this out there: multitasking is a lie—an ineffective, time wasting, quality killing lie.
Despite this, you’ll run into plenty of people in the work place who wear the faux-badge of “multitasker” with pride. But those people are wrong, and if you’ve ever referred to yourself as a “great multitasker”, then you’re wrong too.
Honestly, with all the information out there about the negative effects that multitasking has on our productivity, performance, and brain, it’s amazing anyone would actually identify as such. Regardless, many do, so let’s see if we can’t put a rest to this nonsense, and get everyone back to being productive. Yeah?
BECAUSE SCIENCE!
We don’t know about you, but at WideNet, we tend to trust what science has to say when it comes to things our brains can and can’t do (especially since we’re marketers and not…brain doctors). And one thing science tells us about our brains is that they aren’t meant for multitasking.
What many of us call multitasking is actually something called task-switching, which is where our brains retract all focus on one task, and completely redirect it to another.
So rather than handling a bunch of stuff at one time, we’re actually spending 3 seconds totally focused on this thing, then 4 seconds focused on that thing, and so forth. And even though it only takes less than a second to switch between tasks, it wastes A LOT of brain power. It destroys our ability to give anything our complete attention, which in turn keeps us from being effective, productive workers.
In fact, studies say that trying to multi-task cuts our productivity down by about 40%. And the 60% you actually manage to produce is most-likely going to be crap. All the brain activity you wasted switching between tasks could have been used to create one complete, awesome thing.
Super-taskers, as they’re called, are basically X-Men, and you’re probably not one.
So no matter what we may try to tell ourselves, our brains hate multitasking. They aren’t made for it—for the vast majority of us anyway. For an extremely small minority (2% of the population), multitasking can be done. However, it’s not a learned talent. Their brains are literally different than everyone else’s. Super-taskers, as they’re called, are basically X-Men, and you’re probably not one.
Have You Tried Focusing?
You don’t have to tell us about the black hole of stress that the work place can become, especially if you’re someone with a lot of responsibilities. It’s easy to fool ourselves into thinking that we HAVE to multitask in order to get everything done. But you don’t.
Rather than trying to get everything done at once, focus more on organization and prioritization. Break your tasks down into micro goals, and concentrate on completing one task at a time. By letting your brain do what it’s made to do and focusing your full attention on one project, you WILL get everything done, and you won’t sacrifice quality. In the words of Ron Swanson, “Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.”
