Multitasking is not heroic; it’s counterproductive.

Every time our high-tech e-mail device vibrates, it carries the promise of potential rewards.

More often than not, it’s procrastination in disguise, however, it helps us feel, at least briefly, that we’ve accomplished something—even if only pruning our e-mail in-boxes and whipping off those spam emails.

However, the email is often is about an issue which has snowballed into a major one and thus is adorned by a dozen cc’s to your juniors and seniors across the organization

So what was just an innocuous temptation to get distracted from the current task at hand actually turned out to be a major disruption to the existing flow of thing.

Unfortunately, current research that multitasking unequivocally damages productivity. It is a terrible coping mechanism that makes us less productive, less creative, and less able to make good decisions. If we want to be effective leaders, we need to stop.

Multitasking is not heroic; it’s counterproductive.

As the technological capacity for the transmission and storage of information continues to expand and quicken, the cognitive pressures on us will only increase. We are at risk of moving toward an ever less thoughtful and creative professional reality unless we stop now to redesign our working norms.

This is because our brain is best designed to focus on one task at a time.

When we switch between tasks, especially complex ones, we become startlingly less efficient: in a recent study, for example, participants who completed tasks in parallel took up to 30% longer and made twice as many errors as those who completed the same tasks in sequence.

The delay comes from the fact that our brains can’t successfully tell us to perform two actions concurrently. When we switch tasks, our brains must choose to do so, turn off the cognitive rules for the old task, and turn on the rules for the new one. This takes time, which reduces productivity, particularly for heavy multitasks—who, it seems, take even longer to switch between tasks than occasional multi taskers.

So then how does one cope with the deluge of emails?

Drucker described more than 40 years ago: some combination of focusing, filtering, and forgetting.  

Focussing

Many executives respond through the old strategy of creating “alone time.” Say a specific slot between 6:30 and 8:00 AM;traveling time; any time that you can find in the middle of the day. A noted CEO takes an extreme approach: “I don’t answer or look at any e-mails I don’t want to. I don’t have a cell phone; I don’t have a BlackBerry. My motto is, ‘I don’t want to be connected; I want to be disconnected.’”

However, for this to work, your team must know that it must keep moving throughout the day without rapid-fire input from the top. You have to be explicit with your staff: “If they want an immediate response, it will have to be a phone call. If they send an e-mail they will get a response at the end of the day.”

 What about the relentless barrage of information that pours in?

Managing it may be as simple—and difficult—as switching off the input. Shut down e-mail, close Web browsers, have phone calls go automatically to voice mail, and let your assistant and team know that you are in a focused working session.

“If you’re really addicted and can’t be trusted not to check the BlackBerry when it’s in your pocket or bag, you just have to leave it behind.”

Filter

However, there is this danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater: 

No one wants to lose the ability to stay in touch easily with the organization, customers, and other stakeholders or to “give a short and direct answer to quick questions,”

A good filtering strategy could be 

Giving up the fiction that leaders need to be on top of everything. Rather, plain old delegation is as important with information as it always has been with tasks. As someone puts it aptly –“You cannot read everything. The things that I do look at are the things that matter, the things I really need to make a decision on.”

 Some leaders now explicitly refuse to respond to any e-mail on which they are only cc’d, to filter out issues that others think require no action from them. You also may need to educate the people around you about what deserves to fill your limited time.

Forget

 It bears repeating that giving our brains downtime to process new intellectual input is a critical element of learning and thinking creatively—not just according to researchers, but also to corporate leaders. Bill Gross says, “Some of my best ideas literally come from standing on my head doing yoga. After about 15 minutes of yoga, all of a sudden some significant light bulbs seem to turn on.”

 Getting outside helps—recent research has found that people learn significantly better after a walk in nature compared with a walk in the city. And emotional interaction with other people can also divert attention from conscious intellectual processing, a good step toward engaging the unconscious.

As a noted CEO explains, “When I go home at night, I like to just say, ‘OK, I’m not looking at my BlackBerry for two or three hours.’ I’m just relaxing. I feel like that lets me conserve my energy and focus later.”

A responsibility to hit the ‘reset button’

 All this was easier back in Drucker’s day, when we couldn’t talk on the phone during the daily commute, we didn’t bring multiple connectivity-enabling devices with us on vacation, and planes didn’t have Wi-Fi. The strategies of focusing, filtering, and forgetting are also tougher to implement now because of the norms that have developed around 21st-century teamwork.

Most leaders today would feel guilty if they didn’t respond to an e-mail within 24 hours. Few feel comfortable “hiding” from their teams during the day (or on the drive home or during the evening) in order to focus more intently on the most complex issues. And there is the personal satisfaction that comes from feeling needed.

 But there is a business responsibility to reset these norms, given how markedly information overload decreases the quality of learning and decision making.

 First, we need to acknowledge and re-evaluate the mind-sets that attach us to our current patterns of behavior. We have to admit that we do feel satisfied when we can respond quickly to requests and that doing so somewhat validates our desire to feel so necessary to the business that we rarely switch off. There’s nothing wrong with these feelings, but we need to consider them alongside their measurable cost to our long-term effectiveness.

Second, leaders need to become more ruthless than ever about stepping back from all but the areas that they alone must address. There’s some effort involved in choosing which areas to delegate; it takes skill in coaching others to handle tasks effectively and clarity of expectations on both sides. But with those things in place, a more mindful division of labor creates more time for leaders’ focused reflections on the most critical