The Cost of Multitasking

 

What is multitasking?

We often think of multitasking as doing more than one thing concurrently

watching YouTube videos while chatting with friends or driving while talking 

on the phone.

Multitasking is both doing multiple things at once and alternating between 

different tasks instead of finishing one and moving on to another(like respond

-ing to emails incrementally while working on a larger project).

Side effects of doing multitasking:

According to Earl Miller a Neuroscientist at MIT, our brains are "not wired to multitask well... when people think they are multitasking, but they are actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly and every they do, there is a cognitive cost." It can lead to permanent brain damage. Once you begin to operate multiple devices at once your brain gets acclimatised to this behaviour and its structure alerts.

Much unlike popular belief, Multitasking does not increase your productivity, but rather decreases it. One of the recent studies in the University of London found that individuals who multitasked saw significant IQ drops. Our brains cannot store a lot of information at a time and it is only performing tasks one after the other at a faster speed. 

Multitasking also decreases our concentration levels because you are way too stressed about completing all the jobs at hand. Studies show that while multitasking, the production of stress hormone "cortisol" increases and leaves us feeling mentally drained and exhausted. While your brain tries to figurer out the best way to do everything together, half of the time is wasted in stressing about their completion, which could have been saved you focused on only one thing at a time. These tasks that we do together, are not actually tasks, they are just distractions from your original task and keep you from focusing on it. Such distraction also does not allow your brain to think creativity and apply to it to the said task, thus killing any chances of breakthrough ideas which could have crossed your mind, had you focused one job at a time.

While you multitask, your brain's will muscle gets weaker and decision-making becomes tough, as the brain is unable to prioritise one task as more important than the other. Its become difficult for the brain to organise thoughts and pick out relevant information. More it reduces the quality of work and efficiency.

The next time you find yourself multitasking when you are trying to be productive, take a quick assessment of the various things you are trying to accomplish. Eliminate distractions and try to focus on one task at a time.