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By Vicki Flaugher, CEO of SmartWoman Guides

Many modern entrepreneurs brag about their ability to “multi-task”. They see themselves as expert jugglers, constantly on the go, with their attention here, there, and everywhere. Somehow they think that speed applied to as many different channels as they can muster will skyrocket their success forward.

For awhile, it seems to work, this hyperactive and quite delicate balance of spinning so many plates at a time. Like a circus act doing magic tricks, it seems entertaining and perhaps even the right thing to do. But eventually, something happens to nudge the balancing act – sometimes even just one small thing -  and it all comes crashing down. The havoc wreaked by an even larger nudge, such as a major illness or loss of a family member, not only stops the spinning, but breaks the china plates to the point of no return.

I want to be perfectly clear – mult-tasking is a myth, a fabricated concept that isn’t even true in reality, and, more importantly, is probably hurting your business. It might even be threatening your health and safety.

From an article entitled The Myth of Multitasking by Christine Rosen, in the New Atlantis, here’s some information for you to ponder:

“In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, ‘Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.’ “

“One study by researchers at the University of California at Irvine monitored interruptions among office workers; they found that workers took an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from interruptions such as phone calls or answering e-mail and return to their original task.”

“Discussing multitasking with the New York Times in 2007, Jonathan B. Spira, an analyst at the business research firm Basex, estimated that extreme multitasking—information overload—costs the U.S. economy $650 billion a year in lost productivity.”

What we perceive as multitasking is actually a very, very fast switching between singular events, not doing multiple events at one time. If you change back and forth quickly enough, you may interpret those events to be simultaneous, but your brain does not. It’s having to move it’s attention and its firing neurons in a rapid fire, shallow manner to keep up. Like a form of chosen ADD,  we order our brain to keep up with so many points of information that we get fatigued, drained, and we greatly hamper our memory capacity.

And if we multi-task while we are trying to learn? Ms. Rosen cites another source here:

“In one recent study, Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that ‘multitasking adversely affects how you learn. Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.’ “

So , what are you doing right now? Is the bell of a new incoming email sounding, is your phone vibrating, is the TV on, or maybe you’re also listening to a training audio? Do you become panic stricken as you contemplate a life doing one thing at a time, with deep attention and focus? Do you have a million and one reasons why multitasking is good for you? Research isn’t on your side promoting that view, so perhaps an adult  “time out” is in order? It’s something to think about,  one thought at a time…

Together, we are stronger!
Vicki Flaugher, the original SmartWoman

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