This is a guest post by one of the UK’s leading experts in digital distraction and digital detox, Frances Booth, author of The Distraction Trap: How to Focus in a Digital World, A Writer For All Seasons, and more productivity tips. Find out more about her here.
Here’s a work scenario most of us are familiar with …
You’ve just settled down to the task you’re doing, when someone interrupts you and asks you to do something else instead.
So, you switch tasks and put aside whatever it was you were doing.
But how much has switching your attention in this way just cost you in terms of lost productivity?
Research shows that switch-tasking – where we switch from one task to another – is extremely bad for productivity.
Yet many of us switch-task for large parts of every day. (We often think of this as multitasking, though what happens is we’re actually switching rapidly between tasks.)
It’s not just other people who interrupt us. We also interrupt ourselves. We get distracted, or we let a new demand – that comes in via email, for example – to throw us off course.
‘Multitasking’ has become a way of life for many of us. Yet it’s sapping our productivity.
We toggle all day between emails and a piece of work we’re doing. Or we check our smartphone all the time, switching task frequently to read and reply to messages.
We like to think we can do two things at once.
We do this to such an extent that media multitasking has become the norm.
Often, we multitask because it feels like we’re being more productive. But this is not the case.
Evidence shows that multitasking saps productivity and can leave us exhausted.
When we switch from one task to another, we use “goal shifting” to decide to do one thing instead of another, and we use “role activation” to change the rules for the previous task to the rules of the new task, researchers have found.
Both of these processes cost us time.
While there might be relatively small switch costs for just one switch of task, if we start to switch repeatedly back and forth, the costs add up.
In fact, the costs are huge. Switching between tasks can cost you as much as 40% of your productive time, according to expert David Meyer.
So if we ‘multitask’ or rather switch-task as our standard mode of working we’re missing a very important productivity trick.
If you want to become instantly more productive, do one thing at once.
It sounds simpler than it is. To do this, we need to develop our skills of mental focus, learn strategies to avoid distraction, and find ways to cut down on interruptions by other people.
However, for the productivity boost it gives us, it’s worth a bit of work to achieve.
So rather than spending the day multitasking, try boosting your productivity by doing one thing at a time.
