Price of Success? - Multitasking

#architectofabundance #ananatomyofsuccess #deepakchaudhury #personaltransformationcoach

Everybody wishes, hopes and wants to become successful. But not everybody becomes successful That is because, success is reserved for only those who deserve it.

Success is not easy, it is really difficult. And it is difficult mostly because of the price we have to pay for it. Yes, we have to pay the price for our own success. And when I say price, I am referring to all those things we have to stop doing, we have to give up, in order to transform into our best version which can attract success and abundance into our lives. This needs tremendous amounts of self-awareness on the part of the individual.This is what I call the Price of Success? because without paying this price there is no way a person can attain any kind of success in any front of life.

Now the question becomes, what all you have to give up or stop doing in order to become the person who can & will attract all kinds of success. The list is truly long, but in this articles we will discuss “Multitasking” something a lot of people think they are masters of, but this is not possible for human beings biologically.

Let us start with the fundamental questions like,

• What is multitasking?
• Are we genetically and psychologically designed to do multitasking?
• IF yes, who is the better multitasker, men or women?
• What is the neuroscience behind multitasking?

Let’s dive right in.

Multitasking is the process of doing multiple things simultaneously. This is a term introduced in 1965 by IBM describing the power of its computers.

But a lot of people believe and argue that we – human beings are also capable of multitasking and the pretext behind this is a belief that multitasking makes us Productive, which cannot be farther from truth.

Three researchers at Stanford University led by Psychologist Eyal Ophir conducted a study to understand multitasking by students who were using digital devices in class. And the result of the study along with many other similar studies confirmed that,

Human brain is not capable of multitasking. When people think they are multitasking, what is happening is they are switching between these tasks rapidly and this is called Task Switching or Context Switching. Some people, especially teenagers are good at switching rapidly back & forth between the tasks, but this has its negative impacts.

Let’s understand this in detail.

There are four steps involved in task switching or context switching.

Step 1 – Shift Alert

Imagine you sat at your office desk to write a mail. This very moment blood quickly rushes through your anterior prefrontal cortex. This area of our brain works like a switchboard, alerting the brain that its about to shift attention.

Step 2 – Rule Activation for Task 1

This alert raised by the prefrontal cortex is a two-part message, which travels through our brain as electric signals between the neural networks. The first part of the message is a Search Query to locate the neurons capable of executing the writing task.

The second part encodes a command that will engage the neurons once discovered. This process is called “rule activation” and takes several tenths of a second to accomplish. You begin to write your mail.

Step 3 – Disengagement

Let’s say while you are typing your mail, your phone makes a ding, alerting you about a WhatsApp message you just received. Because the rules for writing an email is different from the rules for texting a friend or a lover, your brain must disengage from the email writing rules before you can respond.

So, the switchboard is consulted, alerting the brain that another shift in attention is about to happen.

Step 4 – Rule Activation for Task 2

The brain deploys another two-part message seeking the rule-activation protocol for texting. As before, the first part is a command to find the neurons involved in texting and the second part is an activation command. Now you can message your friend or your lover. And as before, it takes several tenths of a second to perform the switch.

These four steps must occur in sequence every time there is a task switch. This takes time and is sequential and this is precisely why we cannot multitask.

Task switching has some very significant negative impacts.

• A person who is interrupted takes 50% longer to accomplish a task and makes up to 50% more errors.
• A study conducted by Realization shows that multitasking can result in a productivity loss of up to 40%. In the absence of multitasking, there was a 59.8% average increase in the number of projects completed and a 35.5% reduction in the time it took to complete a project.
• Research from the University of Sussex found that multitasking can lead to emotional illnesses like anxiety & depression. And nothing paralyzes a company like workplace depression. In fact, depression costs US employers approximately $23 billion in productivity loss annually. If you are a believer in data, then you should understand that employees with depression miss an average of 8.7 days of work each year because they aren’t filling well as compared to employees without depression who average around 4.6 days out of work annually. Multitasking isn’t helping anyone.
• As per Michael K. Gardner, Professor of educational Psychology at the University of Utah, “people’s estimate of their own task switching abilities is almost always higher. 50% people think they are great at task switching, but only 1% really are, so 49% people are deluding themselves.”
• Brain scans have shown that chronic task switching thins your prefrontal cortex. So, the very part of your brain you need to focus (something that is responsible for the executive function of the brain) gets fried. It’s neurotoxic” – says Joshua Ehrlich, an executive coach and chair of the “Global Leadership Council”.

According to a study carried out at the University of Illinois, Chicago, “Multitasking requires a lot of temporary brain storage which is commonly known as the working memory. With less working memory available we cannot think creatively. So, task switching reduces or kills creativity.

Way forward

Having all this knowledge about multitasking is good but it doesn’t matter if companies don’t act to stop multitasking at workplace. And as I mentioned at the beginning, this is a controversial topic and it gets interesting.

Have you observed that people do not believe in multitasking as long as they are individual contributors or team members? In those roles most of them prefer to be assigned a single project / task and complete it before moving on to a new one. If they are assigned multiple projects / tasks they resist it and fight against it. But the moment they become managers, they start believing in multitasking; in fact, they are forced to assign multiple tasks to their team members.

I am a strong believer in the power of focus and hence my advice would be to assign a single project and allow the team to focus on it and deliver it before moving on to a new one. And as proven from the study by Realization, number of projects completed and duration per project both improve when multitasking is avoided.

The second advice I have is to design workplace which will devoid of any kind of external distraction for employees. Refer Robin Sharma’s “Tight Bubble of Total Focus”

1. Force yourself into short bursts of focus – ideal would be a 45-60 minutes modules of focused work, separated by 10-15 minutes of attending / responding to communications.
2. Turn off App notification – for focus and improved productivity it is advisable to Turn Off your App notifications during work hours. And designate specific time for social interactions – like call to home at a particular time of the day, email checking and responding at a few particular times of the day, attending meetings and trainings at a particular time of the day etc.
3. Designate specific time of the day for checking emails and inform your teams, management and customers about these timing and set appropriate expectations about reverting on emails.
4. Start practicing having only one tab open on your system at any time.

Coming to multitasking and whether men or women are better multitaskers, there has been no conclusive study suggesting any strong correlation between gender and capability to multitask. But I personally feel that men are better than women at task switching and here is my proof ??

Closure

Here is a summary of things we have discussed in this chapter,

• Multitasking is not possible by a human brain.
• We understood the four-step process involved in task switching.
• We looked at the negative impacts of multitasking at workplace.
• We also understood that there is no conclusive data suggesting any correlation between task switching and gender.

I believe you have gained a better understanding of multitasking now. I encourage you to now plan your activities so that you can avoid the negative effects of multitasking.