Don’t Multitask–It’s A Productivity Killer

How many job postings have you seem with “ability to multitask” listed as a job requirement? I’ve seen a few. How many times have you heard a friend, acquaintance, or coworker brag about their ability to do multiple things at once? We’ve all heard it a thousand times. Maybe we’ve even claimed to be an effective multitask-er ourselves. Well, I’ve got news for you: we aren’t.

Our Brains Are Not Wired To Multitask

Our brains are wired to work much like a computer processor. That is, we can consciously focus on one and only one thing at a time. To prove it to yourself, try to carry on a phone conversation and compose an email at the same time. You can’t do it! You have to constantly switch between focusing your attention on the phone conversation and writing an email. Otherwise, you will end up with gibberish coming out on both tasks.

“So what?” you may ask. “So long as the penalty for switching between tasks isn’t large, I can get more of the important things I want to get done in a given period of time.” Unfortunately, the penalty for context switching is very large: about 40% according to most research. That is, when you multitask between two or more tasks, you will be about 40% less efficient with your time than if you focused on just one task at a time.

Do This Instead

The reason we all feel the need to multitask is that we feel like we have way too much on our plates to accomplish it all. Better to do a half-assed job on a few of the less-important tasks while getting them all “done” than accomplish just one or two of the most important exceptionally well, the theory goes. This is comparing apples to oranges, though. Generally what will happens is that you will become overwhelmed and begin to cut corners on all of the tasks, even the most important ones, instead of just the less-important tasks. Due to the huge penalties involved in context switching, you can generally get a lot more output from your efforts if you focus on the highest-value tasks first.

Generally, not all tasks on your list will be equally-important. One or two of the tasks will likely be absolutely vital, a few more may be very important but perhaps not urgent, and the rest probably fall into the “nice to have” category. To maximize efficiency, start with the highest-value task and focus only on that task. Do not switch back and forth between the two or three highest-value tasks, since the costs of context switching will kill you. Focus on one and only one task until it is completed with an acceptable level of quality. Then, move on to the next most-important task. This one simple change alone will boost your productivity by between 30-40%, if the research is to be trusted. How big of a raise do you think you could ask for if you got 40% more work done every week?

It may seem that switching between many different tasks can give you the best short of getting all your tasks finished, but the research shows that’s not the case. Over the coming weeks, I’m going to write about a few of my favorite productivity tips, most of which involve not multitasking.

For more on the research about multitasking and context switching, check out the American Psychological Association’s page on Switching Costs.