![]() Multitasking actually increases the amount of time it takes to complete a single task by about 50%. It’s clear that attention residue and quickly switching between two tasks can impede your productivity, but how often is this really affecting the quality of your work and your time management? The statistics are sobering: the average office worker spend an average of one minute and fifteen seconds on a task before looking at something else, and research reveals that multitasking throughout the workday can result in a 40% drop in productivity and 50% more errors in your work. If you want to step up your performance and reclaim your time to have more opportunities to do what you love, it’s time to say goodbye to multitasking and get familiar with the concept of “deep work” and the practice of monotasking. Multitasking and switching between screens can make you feel more productive in the moment, but in the long run, it’s eating up time that you could spend on your hobbies, creative projects, or relaxing with family and friends. ![]() Pausing your work to check your email, looking at a text in the middle of a meeting, or talking on the phone with a client while researching a separate project all qualify as multitasking, but because these tasks seem so basic and unavoidable, we rarely stop to consider that this could be having an impact on the quality of our work or our productivity. In this age of digital distractions, it’s tough to avoid multitasking, and many of us have made it a habit. If you’re still thinking about a previous task while starting another, that attention residue is going to impede your focus, and if this becomes a pattern over time, your overall performance could suffer. Instead of finishing one task, taking a short break, and then turning your full attention to the next thing on your to-do list, bouncing from one task to another and back again results in “ attention residue” clouding your concentration. ![]() When you multitask, you’re not working on two tasks at the same time-you’re actually rapidly switching between tasks without giving your brain the time it really needs to completely focus on each one. Unfortunately, while we may feel that our productivity increases when we multitask, practical results and countless studies tell us otherwise. It’s easy to assume that multitasking will allow you to do double the work in half the time-after all, if you’re doing two things at once, your productivity must skyrocket, right? Not quite.
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