Many people favor multitasking, especially when it comes to remote working and freelancing since being your own boss and working for several clients demands tremendous versatility. But being versatile or flexible doesn’t necessarily mean multitasking.
We’ve all heard about multitasking. “The human ability to carry multiple tasks at the same time”. And I’m sure you know at least someone that fits this profile. The mother who cooks the meals does the laundry and keeps an eye on her babies, or that friend who studies for a test and plays video games at the same time, or… perhaps you are that person. Some people wonder, how’s that even possible? How do they concentrate on two things at the same time? And the answer is: they don’t.
What makes multitasking possible is a quick attention switch between one thing and another, and even if this allows you to carry more than one task at a time, the big risk lies in the fact that if your attention is not fully resting on any of the tasks, you may deliver poor results.
In order to clarify this subject, we researched the ups and downs of multitasking, to bring you the realistic side of the story.
Time-Saving
Many people say multitasking helps you save time. It seems logical to think that by doing two things at the same time you would be saving the time you would invest in them separately, however, despite this deduction, research has shown that doing two things together takes twice as long to finish at least one of them.
For this reason, most time management techniques are about fixing the concentration on one specific task and only that at least for a certain time, until you finish it or do most of it, without being distracted or busy with other things.
It is more effective to stick with one task to completion than to balance between two or more at a time. So instead of doing that, you can try implementing one of these time management techniques!
Resilience
This belief that multitasking is encouraging, might be a little more accurate for people with an optimistic point of view about the world, those who learn from every life experience they have. However, going through how stressful multitasking can be, can do a lot more to hinder your progress than it can do to help you.
It has been found that multitasking increases the production of cortisol, the stress hormone, which is awfully exhausting for your mind.
Stress can be a huge obstacle to your productivity, and a time bomb for your mental health, which is even more important, don’t you get all stressed when two people talk to you at the same time and you can’t decide which one of them to listen to? Exactly. That’s just how your brain feels when you force multitasking on you.
There are lots of other ways to grow resilience without damaging yourself.
Poor Performance
By having to multitask, workers have to divide their attention, which can even lead to frequent errors, affecting aspects such as health and performance at work. Several scientists showed how students who use many media at the same time are slower than those who do not, so multitasking affects performance.
Bad Quality Results
If your attention is divided, there is no way you can dedicate yourself as well as you really could to both tasks. So even if you do get an acceptable result, in the end, you are limiting your potential enormously, forcing your brain to deal with more than it should at the moment.
All things work best when they are given full attention and dedication. So instead of trying to do your tasks and talk to someone on the phone at the same time, organize your priorities and take care of only one thing at a time. I promise that the results will encourage you to organize yourself this way always.
Mental Health
Multitasking is usually associated with a dexterous mental capacity, the ability to quickly shift attention from one thing to another. However, it is a detrimental practice for both your efficiency and your mental health.
Research conducted at Stanford University showed all the damage multitasking does. From lowering IQ as much as sleep deprivation to permanent cognitive impairment. Another study, made in the University of Sussex found that high multitaskers had less brain density in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region responsible for empathy as well as cognitive and emotional control.
Multitasking slows you down and decreases your emotional intelligence and mental health, and also the quality of your work. There’s no reason to damage your brain in such a dangerous way when you can organize your time and working schedule to undertake every task on its own time.
Some Advice
Although you already know how harmful multitasking can be, it is understandable that it’s already an acquired habit of yours, and it’s difficult for you to break up with it. However, as always, one of our main objectives is to educate freelancers on how to take care of their mental health, so we want you to know some tips that can help you a lot when starting to practice another method of work, a healthier and more effective one.
Make a To-Do List
From time to time (maybe every week, maybe every month, it’s up to you), set a list of all the things you have to do. You can sit down and write it right now, or maybe in the next small break that you have, and keep doing it every time more tasks keep coming.
Classify and Prioritize
Decide which tasks are more important, to determine which ones you will accomplish first and which ones can wait a little longer.
In this way, you can start organizing your schedule to dedicate a certain time each day to finish task by task, everything you have to do, and thus prevent procrastination and saturation of pending tasks when the deadline approaches.
Control Multitasking
Multitasking is inevitable to avoid completely, but what you can do is reduce it to a minimum, so you can allow your brain to work at its best, but also exercise it from time to time. It’s impossible to prevent and organize everything, life is all about changes, so even if you set a perfect schedule, you don’t know what’s going to happen and if you’re going to be able to really accomplish it.
It might come the day when you have to do two things at a time again. However, even if these situations might happen once in a while, try to respect your times and routines. And by respecting your time I mean all of them: your sleep time, your eating time, your alone time as much as your work time.
Multitasking is present in every aspect of our lives. Nowadays we are bombarded with stimuli and tasks with the speed with which we blink. And although yes, technology continues to advance and we with it, our bodies are still sensitive and affected by the excessive amount of stimuli, tasks, and occupations that today’s working life demands.
There are things that you can’t get rid of. You need to stay connected keep up the fast pace and always be on the go to be successful at work. That’s why instead of telling you to dedicate yourself to one thing at a time, we show you what is damaging about it and what you can do to solve it and live a healthier life while still betting on your success.
Even if you want to be big and thrive, don’t forget the most important thing to accomplish anything in life is being healthy and good within yourself!
See more articles by Andrea Corona
