productivity,  Success Strategy,  Time Management

The Myth of Multitasking

Too many times, I hear that you can’t survive without multitasking. Checking emails during a meeting, responding to a door knock while trying to focus on your work seems to be a common scenario at the workplace. While it often pays off to take care of multiple things at once, it would be useful to look at our brain to see when it is NOT the best strategy.

According to this book, any task requiring a small amount of analysis or decision-making is processed in the brain’s pre-frontal cortex (PFC). The PFC is a tiny and very much energy-hungry part that sits right behind our forehead. If the rest of the brain is like the US economy, the size of PFC is like the changes you usually have in your pocket. Between any two tasks, if one of them is very rudimentary (something like driving your car in a known street), you can do some other task simultaneously like talking or listening to the radio. But when both the tasks need your PFC, you are basically context switching between the two tasks.

The more you context switch, the PFC gets more tired. Ultimately its performance starts decreasing, the work quality hampers, and you feel exhausted.

The analytic work needs expensive PFC action; we try to avoid those as much as possible by design. This explains nicely why I would rather answer the door at my office than pay undivided attention to the design problem I am trying to solve. Not to mention, I have checked my Facebook notifications (non-PFC function) twice while writing this post (expensive PFC function)!

So next time you convince yourself that you are getting more work done by multitasking- think again. If you take activity as the synonym of productivity, you may get disappointed very soon!


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This article was originally published in Nov 2012. Feature image: Pixabay.