In today’s fast-paced world, multitasking is often celebrated as a necessary skill. We’re encouraged to juggle multiple tasks, believing it leads to greater efficiency and productivity. However, contrary to popular belief, multitasking is not the productivity booster it’s hyped to be. Instead, it’s more of a productivity killer, leading to decreased efficiency, increased stress, killing time and a superficial engagement with tasks.
The Illusion of Efficiency
Multitasking creates the illusion that we are getting more done because we’re switching between tasks quickly. However, research shows that the human brain is not designed to focus on multiple tasks simultaneously. What we call multitasking is often just rapid task-switching, where the brain shifts attention from one task to another. This constant shifting comes with a cognitive cost, known as “task-switching cost. It means we lose time and efficiency every time we switch between tasks.
Studies have found that multitasking can reduce productivity by as much as 40%. The brain needs time to refocus after switching tasks, and this refocusing period can accumulate, leading to significant loss of time. Moreover, multitasking often results in more mistakes, as the brain cannot fully concentrate on the details of each task.
As most you might have experienced in life, reading something on the phone while watching a movie, leads to disconnecting from the movie leading to rewinding the wasting more time than actually pausing the movie, reading the stuff and resuming again.
People think they are smart enough than “average” people, and they are special and can do multiple task at once. But its better to realize the truth sooner than later.
Multitasking can not only lead to loss of time but also increase stress levels, degrade the quality of work, create neurological patterns into the brain causing it to switch between tasks frequently leading to loosing concentration power.
Instead of Multitasking, tasks can be prioritized according to their importance. Scheduling is another great tool to tackle multitasking. We need to rewire ourselves from doing all at once to doing one thing at a time in an efficient way.