Multitasking is a lie because nearly everyone accepts it as an effective think to do.
It’s become so normal that everyone thinks it’s something they should do, and do as often as possible.
More than 6 million web pages offer answers on how to do it, and even job posting websites list ‘multitasking’ as a skill and a strength.
Some people become so proud of their supposed multitasking skill, they have adopted it as a way of life.
Actually though, it’s a ‘way of lie’ not life. The truth is ‘multitasking’ is neither efficient or effective. In a results oriented world, it will fail you every time.
When we try to do two things at once, we can’t or won’t do either very well. And if you think multitasking is an effective way to get more done, you’ve got it the complete wrong way round.
In Gary Keller’s best selling book (The One Thing), he goes into this subject in great detail. And I highly recommend the book to anyone, both for business and personal development.
In 2009 a professor at Stanford University (Clifford Nass) set out on a mission to find out how well so-called multitaskers multitasked.
Nass himself had been ‘in awe’ of multitaskers and deemed himself to be a poor one.
He and his team of researchers gave 262 students questionnaires to determine how often they multitasked.
They divided their test subjects into 2 groups, high and low multitaskers, and began with the presumption that the high multitaskers would perform better. They were wrong!
“I was sure that they had some secret ability” said Nass. “But it turns out that high multitaskers are suckers for irrelevancy”.
The high multitaskers were out performed on every measure. They’d convinced themselves and the world that multitasking was great and they were great at it.
But there was only 1 problem, which the research proved, and to quote Nass, “Multitaskers were just lousy at everything”.
So in conclusion Multitasking is merely the opportunity to screw up more than one thing at a time.
Research has proved without doubt, that its best to concentrate fully on doing 1 thing well, and when finished do another 1 thing well and so on.
Focussing on 1 thing at a time, makes you and your team much more efficient and effective.
