Last updated: January 5, 2018 at 1:38 am
Are you the type of person who frequently multitasks? Do you believe that multitasking actually makes you more efficient? For example, would you be reading a book, switch to another another activity, then switch to third activity only to return back to reading? This article will dispel the myth that multitasking is good. Furthermore, it will discuss the detrimental effects of multitasking. It will discuss how multitasking actually makes you less efficient, will cause you to produce lower quality work, cause your work to take you longer, and much more all backed up by research.
The Detriments Of Multitasking
Numerous studies show that multitasking actually is detrimental to your productivity and much more than if you had just worked on one task at a time. While working on one task at a time may be boring, it will save you time, and you will probably do better work. A win win.
In his book Crazy Busy, Dr. Edward Hallowell says, “If none of what you are doing requires your full attention, it’s fine to multitask, even though you may make mistakes, miss important points, be impolite, or fail to produce your best work.”
Here are some of the many detriments of multitasking, all backed up by research:
*Loss of productivity
*Lower quality work
*Work takes longer to do
In studies, ironically, people who say they are good at multitasking are generally worse at multitasking than people who don’t rate themselves very good at multitasking. Also ironic is the fact that productivity is reduced when you multitask. The whole point of multitasking was to be more productive, wasn’t it?
So, here is one thing I recommend on this topic. If say, you have 5 things to do, try to do one item at a time, sequentially, from most important to least important. If you can’t complete one specific item in a day, work on it the next day, and don’t switch between tasks on the same day.
Research Studies On Multitasking
According to a study published by the NIH,“Multi-tasking enables people to achieve more goals and to experience more activities. However, engaging in multiple attention demanding tasks simultaneously may be cognitively and physically taxing. Moreover, performance on individual tasks may suffer such that errors are made and overall productivity is diminished.”
Likewise from the same study cited above, “Ophir et al. found that persons who frequently multi-task actually exhibited greater switching costs while performing dual tasks than infrequent multi-taskers. Moreover, chronically high multi-taskers were more readily distracted by both irrelevant external stimuli and recently activated internal representations during singular task performance.”
Another study, done on media multitasking, at Stanford University, shows detrimental effects of heavy use of media multitasking. “HMMs [heavy media multitaskers] have greater difficulty filtering out irrelevant stimuli from their environment …, they are less likely to ignore irrelevant representations in memory …, and they are less effective in suppressing the activation of irrelevant task sets (task-switching).”
Taking A Break
All of this being said, taking a break from what you are doing, once in a while, is necessary. For example, if you are writing a paper or reading a book and you expect the task to take several hours for you to complete, you should take a few breaks, at least one per hour. But, during these breaks, you shouldn’t work on another one of your important tasks only to go back to the task you were just working on. Examples of things you could do during a break: stretching, light exercise, eating a snack or surfing the Internet. Just blow off steam. Breaks shouldn’t be more than 15 minutes long.
Self-Test
Test these ideas for yourself:
One day, for a few hours, with various tasks that you have, force yourself to work on only 1 task at a time, and time yourself for how long the tasks take to complete. Then, the next day, do similar tasks with a similar workload, but multitask between them. And time how long it takes you to do the tasks if you are multitasking. Then compare two times. Most likely, assuming you didn’t cheat, the amount of time you worked on 1 task at a time for items would have actually be less than the time in which you multitasked.
What did you think of this article? Let’s discuss this in the comments below.