Though some of us like to think we’re great at juggling jobs, the research simply doesn’t back up this little bit of self-delusion.<\/p>\n
When it comes to multi-tasking, humans are terrible.\u00a0 This is not only my opinion, it is backed up by vast amounts of research.\u00a0 Sadly, most people simply don’t realize just how much time they waste trying to do more than one thing at a time. It is a staggering amount, and since few of us have any spare time, it is something we should look into.<\/p>\n
A minute saved, is a minute earned<\/em><\/strong>.\u00a0 If I’m correct in that assertion, then spending a few minutes reading about how much time you’re wasting “multi-tasking” might be the most sensible investment of your time that you ever make.<\/p>\n To get you going, here is a seeming thumb-suck piece of information. Except it isn’t.\u00a0 The average office worker loses 17 minutes of productivity every time they switch the task they are working on.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, time isn’t the only thing we lose when we multi-task.\u00a0 We also lose effectiveness.\u00a0 What does this mean?\u00a0 It means that we do each of the jobs we task switch between worse. Period.<\/p>\n I came up with what I think is a rather neat analogy that illustrates human multi-tasking.\u00a0 It is based on the other term often used to describe multi-tasking, namely juggling.<\/p>\n Imagine we’re juggling three reasonably complicated tasks.\u00a0 Imagine that each of those tasks is a colored ball, and that we’re juggling them with one hand.\u00a0 Pretty impressive, right?<\/p>\n Wrong.<\/p>\n Yes, it looks impressive to see one hand magically holding three separate balls aloft.\u00a0 However when we analyze it, it is anything but impressive.\u00a0 For the sake of this analogy let us assume work is happening on the task whenever a ball is physically in hand.\u00a0 This casts\u00a0 the impressive feat of multi-tasking in an entirely different light.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because the maximum amount of work the hand can do is limited to 50% of its time.\u00a0 The hand spends half of its time empty, doing nothing useful except switching to the next task.<\/p>\n Were this analogy to carry into the real workplace, multi-tasking workers are actually wasting a staggering 50% of their effective working time.<\/p>\n Now for the bad news.\u00a0 It turns out the analogy does in fact translate into the workplace.<\/p>\n