Multitasking- Don't Do It

I multitask all the time. I brush my teeth while I am showering. I empty the dishwasher while I talk on the phone, I even check my email while I am eating. We all do it and I notice as a mother I do it even more but as we all know when we multitask we aren't focusing 100% on the task we are working on. Sometimes we make huge errors that cost us more time to fix it then to actually focus on doing it right the first time.

So I did a little research as to why we should not be doing it:

*The Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London conducted a study to investigate what damages a person’s IQ more: multitasking, smoking marijuana, or losing a night of sleep. The results show multitasking temporarily lowers a person’s IQ by 10 points, according to http://chicagotribune.com/

*Multi-tasking is less efficient, due to the need to switch gears for each new task, and the switch back again.

*When people try to perform two or more related tasks either at the same time or alternating rapidly between them, errors go way up, and it takes far longer--often double the time or more--to get the jobs done than if they were done sequentially.

*Because the prefrontal cortex is one of the last regions of the brain to mature and one of the first to decline with aging, young children do not multitask well, and neither do most adults over 60.

And of course as I am writing this blog post I am speaking to my husband while checking my blackberry that keeps going off. I need to shut everything out and focus on one thing at a time. Reality is that 9 out of 10 times the things that are distracting us are the least important things we should not be focusing on.

*click on links to read more