Overcoming Laziness

How Multitasking Kills Your Productivity

Posted by john on September 16th, 2006 — Posted in How To Be More Motivated And Productive

“Where was I?”

That’s the most unproductive thing you can say, according to researchers cited in this Yahoo! Finance article on multitasking.

You see, humans are terrible at doing more than one thing at a time, even though most of us think we’re good at it. But when we multitask, two things happen:
1. We get less done.
2. The quality of what we do is lower.

There’s a resumption cost of several seconds every time you get back to task that got interrupted. You get into flow again, and–whammo!–you switch to some other task and get hit with more resumption cost. As you’d imagine, this lost time adds up.

That means it’s faster to do one thing at a time instead of trying to multitask.

The other problem with multitasking: you make more mistakes, and the quality of your work declines.

“Multitasking doesn’t look to be one of the great strengths of human cognition,” says James C. Johnston, a research psychologist at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “It’s almost inevitable that each individual task will be slower and of lower quality.”

MIT researchers found (by doing MRI scans on brains of test subjects) that it’s impossible for the brain to think about more than one thing at a time. Net result: more emails you forgot to proofread before hitting “send,” more mistakes on the paper you wrote, and more careless errors on your client’s project.

Multitasking can be such a temptation. As an entrepreneur, I struggle with it myself. It’s easy to have a lull in a task and then say to yourself, “Gee I wonder if I got any email.”

But now that you know that you can do things faster and with fewer mistakes if you do one thing at a time, you’ll resist that temptation and stay focused. Just that one change can be worth thousands of dollars in increased productivity.