Have you ever tried multitasking? Multitasking means doing several things all at once, so theoretically it allows you to complete more tasks during the short period of time. This is not easy activity, it probably made you very tired after all, but have you paid attention how many of your task you managed to finish?

People around might see you as very busy and hardworking person, you were trying to combine different activities, writing report and talking by phone at the same time, or for example keeping conversation with your friend and writing mobile message. But at the end of the day can you say, that you have done all the things you planned to do, and are you sure you got the best possible results?

Well, of course, there are a lot of things that you can do at the same time easily, such as doing sport exercises and listening to music, or reading a newspaper and eating or drinking something. These simple things are also an example of multitasking, but they are so easy to do, because one doesn’t need to concentrate on both tasks. It is needed to focus only on one activity and second comes so natural, that you don’t even think about it. But in the first examples given in article, the person has to focus on both things: writing report and talking by phone, so the attention is divided. It means it is impossible to do your best if you are trying to focus on more then one activity. In this case doing more and more things brings less and less result.

Below you will find information about other disadvantages of multitasking:

  • Multitasking doesn’t lead to high quality of the work done; actually it may reduce the quality substantially. When you try to talk by phone and write report, the person you are talking with will feel the lack of attention from your side and may be irritated by it and react negatively on your words.
  • Don’t try to concentrate on several things at the same time; anyway it won’t bring any good results. Much better way to be highly effective is to switch quickly from one activity to another, as it is impossible to keep being focused on some tasks at the same moment.

Multitasking don’t give you a try to build effective time management plan. And if your employees had to think about many different tasks at the same time – then their productivity falls.

Is there any solution?
The secret is that multitasking is actually great thing, but it works only if different people are doing different tasks. One has to focus on area he is the best in, and other tasks have to be delegated to other people, who will do it better and quicker, then you. Another solution is to give these numerous tasks to outside workers, so called freelancers.