The Reason Why Multitasking Does Not Work. 😲 - The One Thing by Gary Keller

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In the everyday life of a modern individual, there’s a lot of task switching going on. But there’s a price for task switching. Today we discuss how contrary to popular belief, multitasking doesn’t make you more productive, it makes you less productive.

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Transcript:
Clifford Nass, a professor at Standford University told the New York Times that he was “in awe” of multitaskers. He deemed himself to be a terrible multitasker.

He and his team of researchers gave a large group of students a questionnaire to determine how often they multitasked. They divided their test subjects into two groups of high and low multitaskers and began with the presumption that the frequent multitaskers would perform better. They were wrong.

“I was sure they had some secret ability,” said Nass. “But it turns out that high multitaskers are suckers for irrelevancy.” They were outperformed on every measure. Although they’d convinced
themselves and the world that they were great at it, there was just one problem. To quote Nass,
“Multitaskers were just lousy at everything.” Multitasking is a lie.

People can actually do two or more things at once, such as walk and talk, or chew gum and read a map; but, like computers, what we can’t do is focus on two things at once. Our attention bounces back and forth. This is fine for computers, but it has serious repercussions in humans.

Okay so, how does this work. What’s happening when we’re actually doing two things at once?
It’s simple. We’ve separated them. Our brain has channels, and as a result, we’re able to process different kinds of data in different parts of our brain. This is why you can talk and walk at the same time. One is happening in the foreground and the other in the background.
There is no channel interference.

But when there are 2 tasks of which one is mentally demanding there will always be a channel conflict. You simply can’t effectively focus on two important things at the same time.

A stack of unopened mail and piles of unfinished work sit within sight as people keep swinging by your desk all day to ask you questions. Distraction, disturbance, disruption. Staying on task is exhausting. Researchers estimate that workers are interrupted every 11 minutes and then spend almost a third of their day recovering from these distractions.

When you switch from one task to another two things happen. 1. You decide to switch. 2. you have to activate the “rules” for whatever you’re about to do. Switching between two simple tasks—like watching television and folding clothes—is quick and relatively painless.

However, if you’re working on a spreadsheet and a co-worker pops into your office to discuss a
The business problem, the relative complexity of those tasks makes it impossible to easily jump back and forth. This takes a lot of energy and time. In terms of the time, it costs you anywhere from 25% to 100% of the tasks. Less for simple tasks and more for complicated tasks.
The researchers estimate that we lose 28 per cent of an average workday to multitasking ineffectiveness. Multitasking doesn’t save time, it wastes time.

The research of professor Nass was overwhelmingly clear, multitasking leads to mistakes, poor choices, stress and exhaustion. Don’t buy into the lie that trying to do two things at once is a good idea. Though multitasking is sometimes possible, it’s never possible to do it effectively.

#productivity #personaldevelopment #education