Multitasking: Sabotaging Your Success

What is multitasking, what are its limitations, what are its consequences. If you know a few of these facts, it will help you a lot in your professional or personal life, whether you are a team leader or a manager or a CEO or a founder.

What Is Multitasking?

Any multiple task that requires you to shift your focus and attention again and again. Let me try to understand by giving some examples:

• An accountant handling HR, admin, and operations tasks.
• An HR managing sales and accounts. 
• Cooking while taking care of pets, loading the washing machine, and helping kids with homework.

This type of multitasking helps in making your attention shift quickly and it leads to higher stress, more errors and it takes longer to do something. 

In reality, multitasking is a myth, you never do multitasking. You switch tasks. Multitasking is unnatural, problematic and wasteful.

If you feel that you are multitasking, it is possible only if you are doing any routine, process based, less or no complex task which requires no experience and specialized skill. But such a task also has a limitation. Dual-task performance is indeed limited. Routine tasks like operations, HR, Admin, accounts, customer care, etc. while Creative tasks like painting, composition, writing, solving/understanding criminal cases, sales and others.

Limitation & Consequences:

1. Our brain can focus on one thing at a time.
2. Switching between multiple tasks means we are paying less attention and making more mistakes.
3. Task-switching takes 50% longer time to accomplish and also leads to 50% more errors.
4. That's because each time you switch tasks, your brain has to run through a complex process to disengage the neurons involved in one task and activate the neurons needed for the other. The more you switch your task, the more time you waste and you lower the quality of the work too. 

Why Multitasking is a Myth:

Imagine you are walking while listening to music. Right now your focus is on music. Suddenly, a car rushes towards you. Your focus shifts to self protection. When you are focused on music, you were paying less attention to self protection and when you were focusing on self protection, your focus from music was shifted.

Snake doesn’t bite when it moves and it doesn’t move when it bites.

Your mind is not an exception to this natural law of doing only one activity at a given moment. It can grasp only one thing at a time. That is its design. In the true sense, your mind is not designed for multi-tasking.

Even routine tasks have limits when performed together.

Action: How to Manage Multitasking:

Still, if you are a victim of multi-tasking, then let me share a few best possible solutions with you. This will give some results but it will not give 100% results.

Take Breaks: Stand up, drink coffee or water, take deep breaths, chat with your colleague, or go for a short walk. Give your mind a 10-15 minute break.

Focus on One Task: When starting a new task, take a deep breath, think about the objectives and goals, and start working. Note any thoughts about previous tasks in a diary to stay focused.

Prioritise Tasks: If a task requires several hours of dedicated time daily and is a priority, focus solely on it without worrying about other tasks.

Be a Smart Leader:

As a leader, while assigning tasks to your employee or team member, you must ensure that these tasks require similar skills and don’t overlap. 

If tasks require a switch - accept errors, delay and missing deadlines. As a leader, you must know the strength and weakness of your team member or an employee along with the complexity of the task. If not, existing tasks may also get jeopardised.Conclusion

Multitasking can make you a jack of all trades but master of none. Understand your tasks, know your strengths, and focus on one thing at a time for better results! 

Engage with me!

What are your thoughts on multitasking? Share your experiences in the comments below!

#Productivity #Focus #MultitaskingMyth #WorkLifeBalance #Efficiency #StressManagement #LeadershipTips #MultitaskingMyth #ProductivityHacks #FocusOnOne #LeadershipSkills #WorkSmart #TeamEfficiency #WorkEfficiency #FocusAndProductivity #Productivity #Multitasking #Leadership #MentalHealth