One day this week I was listening to a complex legal lecture on a webcast, reviewing my emails and trying to build a folded origami paper box containing some corporate information that had been sent in a creative and constructive, but ultimately frustrating, format.
Guess what? The box remained flat with lots of random creases, I didn’t really deal with any emails and I missed some critical parts of the lecture.
Multitasking according to Wikipedia is an apparent human ability to perform more than one task, or activity, over a short period (1 hour). An example of multitasking is taking phone calls while typing an email and reading a book. It was originally a term applied to the ability of a computer to process several computer jobs concurrently.
It is an urban myth that men can’t multitask and women can. There is some scientific research supporting this – see this report on some Swiss research in which Scientists discover men's brains are impaired when asked to do a mental task while walking... but women were not affected.
However, as I discovered in reality it seems nobody does multitasking particularly well and that attempting to do so reduces our efficiency on all of the attempted tasks. See this article that suggests Research shows that it’s not nearly as efficient as we like to believe, and can even be harmful to our health.
And here’s another article headed Neuroscientists say multitasking literally drains the energy reserves of your brain which postulates When we attempt to multitask, we don’t actually do more than one activity at once, but quickly switch between them. And this switching is exhausting. It uses up oxygenated glucose in the brain, running down the same fuel that’s needed to focus on a task.
As American entrepreneur and best-selling author Gary W Keller succinctly says: Multi-tasking is merely the opportunity to screw up more than one thing at a time.
Guess what? The box remained flat with lots of random creases, I didn’t really deal with any emails and I missed some critical parts of the lecture.
Multitasking according to Wikipedia is an apparent human ability to perform more than one task, or activity, over a short period (1 hour). An example of multitasking is taking phone calls while typing an email and reading a book. It was originally a term applied to the ability of a computer to process several computer jobs concurrently.
It is an urban myth that men can’t multitask and women can. There is some scientific research supporting this – see this report on some Swiss research in which Scientists discover men's brains are impaired when asked to do a mental task while walking... but women were not affected.
However, as I discovered in reality it seems nobody does multitasking particularly well and that attempting to do so reduces our efficiency on all of the attempted tasks. See this article that suggests Research shows that it’s not nearly as efficient as we like to believe, and can even be harmful to our health.
And here’s another article headed Neuroscientists say multitasking literally drains the energy reserves of your brain which postulates When we attempt to multitask, we don’t actually do more than one activity at once, but quickly switch between them. And this switching is exhausting. It uses up oxygenated glucose in the brain, running down the same fuel that’s needed to focus on a task.
As American entrepreneur and best-selling author Gary W Keller succinctly says: Multi-tasking is merely the opportunity to screw up more than one thing at a time.
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