Podcast Episode 109 — Multitasking

Stop it. Seriously.

Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

Today I want to talk about multitasking.

I have had many debates and discussions about this with people who are convinced they can multitask. I argue that you probably can — but you can’t do it well.

I don’t know if it’s pride, ego, or what, but people like to believe they can do it all, at the same time, and do it all well. The truth is, multitasking makes it impossible to concentrate on each task completely, and switching between tasks can cause confusion, which slows you down and may cause you to miss or forget things.

Think about it. If you’re in the middle of a critical task with many steps and you stop to handle a phone call or do another task, when you get back to the first task, you need to evaluate where you were when you stopped and figure out what to do next before you can proceed. If you had completed that task before moving on, you wouldn’t have lost that time, and you would have been able to give it your full attention, ensuring fewer errors.

In other words, if you concentrate on one thing at a time, you will be less likely to forget things related to that task and get more done.

Obviously, sometimes working on one task at a time is impossible. There are those emergency phone calls or unexpected, urgent requests…