Time Blocking
Another important thing that people often ignore is to focus on only a single task at any given
time.
While multitasking seems like a logical productivity hack, it’s a bad habit and highly
counterproductive.
Why?
The human brain is not optimized for handling multiple tasks at a time. By switching between
tasks, it becomes harder to concentrate on each one.
Multitasking Damages Your Brain And Career, New Studies
Suggest
Research conducted at Stanford University found that multitasking is less productive than
doing a single thing at a time. The researchers also found that people who are regularly
bombarded with several streams of electronic information cannot pay attention, recall
information, or switch from one job to another, as well as those who complete one task at a
time.
A Special Skill?
But what if some people have a special gift for multitasking? The Stanford researchers
compared groups of people based on their tendency to multitask and their belief that it helps
their performance. They found that heavy multitaskers—those who multitask a lot and feel
that it boosts their performance—were worse at multitasking than those who like to do a
single thing at a time. The frequent multitaskers performed worse because they had more
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trouble organizing their thoughts and filtering out irrelevant information, and they were slower
at switching from one task to another. Ouch.
Multitasking reduces your efficiency and performance because your brain can only focus on
one thing at a time. When you try to do two things at once, your brain lacks the capacity to
perform both tasks successfully.
Multitasking Lowers IQ
Research also shows that, in addition to slowing you down, multitasking lowers your IQ. A
study at the University of London found that participants who multitasked during cognitive
tasks experienced IQ score declines that were similar to what they'd expect if they had
smoked marijuana or stayed up all night. IQ drops of 15 points for multitasking men lowered
their scores to the average range of an 8-year-old child.
So the next time you're writing your boss an email during a meeting, remember that your
cognitive capacity is being diminished to the point that you might as well let an 8-year-old
write it for you.
Brain Damage From Multitasking
It was long believed that cognitive impairment from multitasking was temporary, but new
research suggests otherwise. Researchers at the University of Sussex in the UK compared
the amount of time people spend on multiple devices (such as texting while watching TV) to
MRI scans of their brains. They 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.
While more research is needed to determine if multitasking is physically damaging the brain
(versus existing brain damage that predisposes people to multitask), it's clear that
multitasking has negative effects. Neuroscientist Kep Kee Loh, the study’s lead author,
explained the implications: "I feel that it is important to create an awareness that the way we
are interacting with the devices might be changing the way we think and these changes
might be occurring at the level of brain structure.”
Learning From Multitasking
If you’re prone to multitasking, this is not a habit you’ll want to indulge—it clearly slows you
down and decreases the quality of your work. Even if it doesn’t cause brain damage,
allowing yourself to multitask will fuel any existing difficulties you have with concentration,
organization, and attention to detail.
Multitasking in meetings and other social settings indicates low self- and social-awareness,
two emotional intelligence (EQ) skills that are critical to success at work. TalentSmart has
tested more than a million people and found that 90% of top performers have high EQs. If
multitasking does indeed damage the anterior cingulate cortex (a key brain region for EQ) as
current research suggests, it will lower your EQ in the process.
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So every time you multitask you aren't just harming your performance in the moment; you
may very well be damaging an area of your brain that's critical to your future success at
work.
Time blocking offers a great alternative to multitasking.
How does it work?
Divide your day into one-hour blocks — each of which you can use for a specific task or a
group of similar tasks. This way, all your daily tasks are scheduled in advance.
Time blocking is a highly effective time management strategy for two reasons:
It saves you from the multitasking trap. Every task, from the most important to the least, has
been accounted for in advance. Even a distraction gets its own time block.
It helps you escape Parkinson’s law that states: ‘work expands to fill the time available.’
Since you set rigid boundaries, one task does not eat up another’s time (or, in some cases,
the whole day.)
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