Two Ways Multitasking Kills Your Productivity and Six Ways To Avoid It.

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Did you know that multitasking reduces productivity and the quality of your work? If your answer is, “Oh no, it doesn’t. I am good at doing more than one thing at once”, well, think again. Just try this quick exercise:

Part one

• Grab a pen, a paper and a timer.
• Start the timer.
• Write the word productivity in one line and then numbers from 1 to 12 directly under each letter of the word you’ve just written.
• When you finish, stop the timer and note the result.

Part two

• Get your pen, paper and the timer ready again.
• Start the timer.
• Start writing the word productivity, but number each letter underneath as you write the word. P-1, R-2, O-3 and so on.
• When you finish, stop the timer and note the result.

Part tree

• Compare the results.

If you are anything like me, part two took you longer. What are your thoughts?

When I multitask, I feel a bit dopey, sometimes confused with a hint of growing irritation. Previously, when multitasking, I thought I wasn’t clever enough to do more than one thing at a time. This was until I research it. I found out that what I was experiencing was my brain’s natural response to doing things simultaneously. These are the two reasons:

1. Multitasking creates a false sense of being effective

If you have ever read anything about multitasking, you would most likely have heard about these three pieces of research.

It “Splits Your Brain”

Neuroscientists, Etienne Koechlin and Sylvain Charron (INSERM in Paris) discovered that our brain “can’t efficiently juggle more than two tasks because it has only two hemispheres available for task management.” When we focus on one task, our left and right brain hemisphere work together to complete it. When we do two tasks at once, the hemispheres divide their work, each focusing on one of these two tasks only. The real difficulty starts when we try to focus on three and more tasks.

It shrinks your IQ by 10 points

Professor Glenn Wilson’s research (Gresham College, London) showed that people’s problem-solving performance dropped by approximately 10 IQ points when they multitasked.

It makes you slower and leads to more mistakes

Scientists Paul E. Dux and René Marois (Vanderbilt University, US) found that multitasking makes us slower by approximately 30% and doubles the number of potential errors in our work. So, if you thought that by multitasking you saved time, you now know that you spend more time on doing things, and you make more mistakes.

2. Multitasking makes you more stressed and tired

So, considering the above studies, nobody can multitask. What we do is continuously switching our attention from one task to another. It puts more pressure on our brain, and as we absorb less information, the stress level rises. It also takes more energy and time to readjust between individual tasks, and this is how we extend the time we accomplish things further. It’s also harder to remember each task's nuances, which may lead to confusion and tiredness.

So, if the next time when multitasking you feel dumper, slower, and less able to complete a task well, then you are most probably correct.

Why we multitask

We all different, and each of us multitasks for many reasons. I used to do it as I was overambitious, had too many ideas and wanted to be good at everything I did. These were my shortfalls. Some other most common reasons why people multitask are:

• We are impatient and think multitasking will help to achieve more and quicker.
• We think it makes us look more capable.
• We don’t plan and prioritise, leaving important tasks to the end when we think there is no choice but to do them all at once to meet deadlines.
• It gives us instant pleasure and helps to deal with boredom. We crave novelty, especially when doing tasks we consider boring. When we search and find new things, our brain gets a friendly dose of dopamine. This makes us feel good.

If you find yourself in one of these above categories, you may find the below strategies helpful.

Six ways to reduce the need for multitasking

1. Plan your day and do it in a kind to yourself way. Decide on your three or four priorities for the day. It will provide you with clarity on what you need to do and will help plan your time effectively. Focus on your priorities only. Other things schedule in your diary for another time.
2. Do most difficult tasks when your energy level is high, so you are less tempted to divert your attention towards more pleasant tasks. For each of us, energy pick can happen at a different time of the day. Observe yourself for few days. Decide when during the day it is the easiest for you to accomplish things and do it then.
3. Assign your task a specific amount of time and no longer. Stick to it as much as possible. If you find yourself tempted to divert to other things, remind yourself about your time limit and get back to work.
4. Use a disruption list to record “brain pop-ups” — sudden thoughts that may easily lead you to switch your focus to something else. Write it down, park it, get back to your task.
5. Reduce external disruptions: turn your emails, social media and text messages off, and keep your desk clean and tidy. Various mobile and desktop applications on the market can help you with that.
6. Be kind to yourself. Reward your hard work after each completed task. You can decide what the reward will be before you start each task. It will add another level of pleasant anticipation and motivation to keep going.
7. Have regular and planned breaks — and stick to them!

Do you remember the exercise at the beginning of this article? I did this exercise a few years ago, and since then, the way I work has fundamentally changed. Juggling many roles in life, I still slip and multitask at times. However, overall I stopped trying to accomplish several things simultaneously. I swapped it for considered planning and reduced expectations towards myself. I introduced work self-care by setting clear boundaries around what I can achieve in the given time. These changes helped me to regain control over what I do and when. And you can do it too.