Multi tasking is good or bad?. Long back one of my manager told me that I am very good at multi tasking. I thought it was praise and it was. But it won’t be a praise any more once you really understand what is the problem with multi tasking. Just to be clear I am not talking about Multiple Roles we play in our life, which is fine as long as when you play one at a time.
What happens when you multi task? You focus on multiple of tasks/things at a time. Wrong..Your brain cannot focus on multiple things at a time (except Sub Conscious mind – which can do multiple functions at a time). What it does is pay attention to one task and switch back to another task with some intervals. So basically your brain tries to switch between the tasks. What is the problem with this?. It should ok right?. Actually not OK because of multiple reasons.
- One is ,whenever you switch tasks there is some thing called “Switching Cost” – it basically takes time to come back to the last state of the first task. This means you end up spending more time (2X or 3X) to reach to its last state.
- Second problem is you are not going deep into either tasks. But “Deep Work” is essential to good performance. We will talk about this under MIND BOOSTERS.
- Third problem is you are making your brain very inefficient and damaging as well
Read the Stanford research about the dangers of Multi Tasking = > Multi Tasking Dangers
Multiple tasking is a major problem for many people..I do have the problem..It creates an illusion as if we doing great job but actually the output would be very minimal and damaging.
Multi tasking is a MYTH..Hope you got it !!