Multitasking. Good or bad?
Entrepreneur ran an article recently about the impact of excessive communication interruptions in the workplace. The article was titled “Blunt the e-mail interruption.”
A few of the findings from the article:
- E-mail volume is growing at a rate of 66 percent a year.
- The average employee checks e-mail 50 times a day and responds to 77 instant messages.
- University of Minnesota researchers discovered that frequent interruptions caused error rates on other work to double.
Research suggests the brain can focus successfully on one task at a time and that frequent switching reduces productivity. The Entrepreneur article highlights how several companies have purposefully created time without interruptions to improve productivity.
The opposing school of thought is that businesspeople cannot afford to unplug given the volume of information that is important to our everyday business lives and the speed with which that information is moving. The proponents of this approach are more apt to embrace social media and the constant connectedness that it brings.
What do you think? Is multitasking good or bad?
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June 22nd, 2010 at 11:34 am
It's neither. Younger folks can do what is called “multi-tasking” more easily than folks who have only been doing it a few years. Left out of these discussions are how people are learning to prioritize and focus. It's assumed that all this messaging causes folks to “drop” what they're doing to respond. I'm not sure that's true.
I once told a lady I know that I'd read that there's no such thing as “multitasking;” that what really happens is our brains switch from one task to another, but our brains can really only do one thing at a time. She smirked and said, “You've obviously never driven a car with two young boys in the backseat asking you questions like, “Mommy, where did the earth come from?”
I think worrying about it is old hat. People adjust.
June 22nd, 2010 at 5:44 pm
People can do two things at once, but can they do both well? In my
experience I don't drop everything to answer an e-mail the second it
comes up, but if I see the name of someone I recognize, I get curious
about what they want and my mind wanders from the task at hand. It's
easy to lose concentration when information is coming at you from so
many different places, but I agree that people are adapting.