The Illusion of Multitasking: Does It Really Boost Your Productivity?
All people working in the office, at home, with their laptops, or just in the digital world are familiar with Multitasking.
Especially in the last several years, when many of us got an excellent opportunity to work from home, we found a possibility to manage our time as we wanted.
For example, some people started using the Pomodoro technique, where the work takes 30 minutes, then 5 minutes, you get a rest, and so on.
But we often need help to focus on one task per particular period. Again, we are in the digital world and have many distractions.
Just sitting at home, we can be distracted by only one device. It’s a smartphone. The following events get steak our focus:
- emails
- messages
- phone calls
- switching between tasks
And if you are working from the office, then the following things may take you away as well:
- talks with coworkers
- often breaks
- hearing other people’s dialogues
Now, let’s take a look at our regular work day. It’s usually 8 hours. For example, each hour, something steals your 15 minutes. It could be several messages from your friends, emails, calls, etc.
Then, after switching focus between these tasks, we need some time and energy to switch back. Let’s say it’s an extra 5 minutes.
Because we mixed our focus with that of other staff, our main focus and energy are now low, and we need more time to accomplish the same tasks.
If we had a complete focus on one thing, we could do it for 30 minutes, but now, after distraction, we need to spend 40 minutes.
After summarizing all these losses, we can get the following values:
- 15 minutes on distractions
- 5 minutes on switching context
- 10 minutes of extra time because of energy loss
We, on average, have 30 minutes of work and 30 minutes of distraction during each hour of our workday. And it is still okay to mean that 30 minutes we work without distraction and then 30 minutes are full of distractions. But usually, we can’t split our hours into two pieces. Usually, we get distractions every 10 minutes or something like that.
Can you imagine how many hours we lose? In 8 hours, we may lose 4 hours on nothing; that takes even more energy than regular work.
And now think if you could work 4 hours without any distractions, and then the next 4 hours you could use on anything you want:
- sport
- habits
- side hustle
- study new skill
People must make consistent improvements, get new knowledge, and become better and brighter. Only in this case can we make the society around us better and improve the level of life.
If we don’t learn to manage our time correctly, we will spend our whole lives on unnecessary meetings, coffee breaks, and empty talks.
Remember that your time is the most valuable thing you already have; don’t spend it on the things you don’t need, and use it carefully.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. I will leave some others below as well.
