Breaking a Bad Habit

Do you brag about multitasking?  Does juggling a number of tasks make you feel more accomplished at the end of the day? 

You may want to rethink your workflow. 

There's actually no such thing as multitasking.  You're actually asking your brain to constantly switch between tasks, depleting it of important chemicals and exhausting yourself in the process.  You're interrupting one task in order to do another.

In this process you're actually less efficient, not more.

Deep Work

According to computer science professor Cal Newport, in his book, Deep Work, it takes roughly 20 minutes to completely focus on a task.

Every time you stop working to reply to a text message, scroll through social media, or flip aimlessly through your playlist, your brain has to reset before it can achieve the same level of focus again.

A 2009 Stanford University study showed that your brain cannot successfully perform two things simultaneously.

When you try to multitask, both your performance and efficiency go down.

Why?

You cannot pay attention when you continuously overload your brain with multiple streams of information.  You cannot recall information correctly, nor can you effectively switch from one task to another.

In fact, heavy multitaskers actually perform worse than those who do one task at a time because they have a harder time organizing their thoughts and recognizing what's actually relevant to their workflow.

Even worse, multitasking was shown in another study at the University of London to lower men’s IQ scores to that of an average 8-year-old child.

Neuroscientist Dan Levitin puts it into perspective: 

Multitasking has been found to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline, which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking.  Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation.  To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new-the proverbial shiny objects.

Remember that the next time you try to talk on the phone and send an email simultaneously.

Multitasking does not make you superhuman.

In order to set yourself up for Flow, you must concentrate on one task at a time and fully immerse yourself in your work.