In today’s hectic, eternally connected world, everyone continues to attempt to do more with less. Until someone figures out how to add more hours to the day, or more days to the week, we often turn to the idea of multitasking to get more done with the time we have in a day. Brian Atkinson and I are here to tell you, from experience, that multitasking isn’t the panacea it claims to be.
You might be a multitasker if…
Computers are able to switch from task to task, in timeframes that are incomprehensible to human perception, but in reality, every time they are swapping from one task to another, there is downtime as the first task is suspended and the second task resumes. On average, a computer has about a 16% loss while multitasking. So, even computers can’t really multitask.
And humans are far worse than computers at multitasking, experiencing up to a 40% loss in processing efficiency by switching from task to task. How many times have you been working on some sort of technical task, seen an email notification, gone to answer it, and end up buried in Outlook for the next two hours. The human brain is wired to focus on one task at a time, and performs best when given that opportunity. Dr. Sanjay Gupta describes the process of the human brain trying to multitask as load distribution of tasks across our available brain power. MRI studies show that even simple things like listening to music in the car takes resources away from the task of concentrating on driving. Now imagine how terribly inefficient we are when we try to do complex tasks at the same time. Sadly, humans are just physically incapable of multitasking.
We multitask for a variety of reasons, we’re bored, we want to be helpful, we’re overloaded with tasks, our hyper-connected world draws us in multiple directions, or sometimes we’re just plain addicted to it. As our lives and careers progress, we continue to open doors into more and more levels of responsibilities. A new engineer may have a handful of tasks related to one or two projects to juggle at any given time. However, by even the midpoint in your career, you’re often juggling technical tasks, managing a team of employees, more commercial responsibilities, presenting at conferences, as well as any changes that have happened in your personal life, like a partner, children, or caring for parents.
There are ways to help tame the desire or trigger to multitask. First and foremost, turn off notifications on unnecessary applications and your email client. If you set aside time to focus on emails and time to focus on technical tasks, you can be more effective at both, and get more accomplished in the long run. Unfortunately, Pavlov would be so impressed by how well we’ve all trained our brains to respond to that ding of an incoming email.
Use the Outlook task scheduler to set up tasks and flag them for when they need to be finished. If you can answer a question via a quick conversation, pick up the phone or walk across the office and solve a problem in one swoop, rather than 10 emails back and forth. Be disciplined about your email, don’t open it if you don’t have time to respond.
Try some productivity apps to help recapture the sanity in handing your email account and the rest of your day. Boomerang can help you schedule emails, snooze messages until later, and even send reminder messages to those you are awaiting a response from. Toggl and Rescue Time can both help you track where you are spending your time and make suggestions for efficiency improvements.
In addition, there are many applications that can be used instead of email, and are better for fostering collaboration.
This blog post and the presentation it started from were entirely planned, discussed, executed and reviewed via Slack. It provides us a single place to hold our ideas, files, and discussions that is dedicated to the task at hand.
First and foremost, recognize when you are feeling stressed and pushed into multitasking and prevent that amygdala hijacking. By developing and practicing stress reducing techniques, you can retrain your brain’s stress response.
Consider meditation as a means to step away from stress and refocus your brain on the tasks at hand. You don’t need to sit in a particular pose or spend hours deep in concentration. One minute is enough to find that calmer, more focused state of mind. http://www.onemomentmeditation.com/
￭ Limit your email time first thing in the morning
￭ Understand your best time and use it wisely
￭ Learn to say “No” and do it often
￭ Start a “Tomorrow List”
While we all think we are getting more done by multitasking, the reality is that we are getting much less done and the quality of what we are doing is not good. With the do-more, stay-busy epidemic, if we don’t do something to stop the multitasking habit, we will find ourselves overworked, overstressed, and ineffective. Multitasking is killing our productivity but with practice, we can learn to refocus and be mindful of our activities, not just mind-full. Behavioral changes take time but with a little effort and practice, you can break the addiction to multitasking.
Nice blog! I wonder how much time we have all collectively wasted just from shifting gears and multitasking? I wonder what kind of an efficiency opportunity we have if we can learn to be more effective in managing this? There are some times when you do need to be aware of something that will distract you or you do need to be able "to appropriately juggle all the balls that you need to keep in the air"; but wisdom is knowing when you need to pay attention and drop one thing for something else and when you need to just stay focused. It is good to be aware of this and to make conscious decisions versus letting ourselves drift without recognizing the shift and the consequences.