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?
Related posts: