Here’s why multitasking is a myth

I’m sure there’s many of you out there that think they can multitask at maximum efficiency. I’m here to turn the tides on your opinions.

First of all, let’s address why we multitask. Multitasking seems fundamental to managing work, hobbies, family and the endless black hole that is social media. Because we have come as easy as smartwatches, it takes a small ping on your wrist to put you in top gear, with hours of back and forth messaging and work ahead. With what seems like endless tasks, we are somewhat forced to multitask, without realising it is just making the quality of work worse and just making the duration longer.

Our brain has a limited Working Memory, which is the garage you’re currently working in. Other parts of memory are stored safely in the big house. The garage is, unfortunately, quite small and can only handle a car at a time. When you put two or more cars in, you barely have space to move, never mind work. Fixing one car, which was supposed to take you an hour, takes you a day because you can’t decide which car to fix, and even if you do pick, the other car keeps leaking something out and you can’t ignore it. A day goes by, and you’ve attached the red wire to the blue instead of the yellow wire, and the car horn on the other stopped working in the process. See how quickly it becomes overwhelming? While this example is, to some extent, exaggerating, it is not that far from the reality of your brain activity during multitasking. That indecisiveness between which task to complete first, with the additional pressure of emails and notifications from 70 different people make the completion of the task much longer and the quality of the work is not as good as it should be. I could go on, but at that point, it will be crossing the boundaries of a blog and turning into a lecture with psychology terms thrown left, right and center. We’ll save that delightful ordeal for a later time.