If you only do one thing this week… avoid multitasking

Often considered the pinnacle of efficiency, multitasking can actually be a negative practice, according to latest research. So stop what else you're doing and concentrate, says Giles Morris

Original article: http://tinyurl.com/yau96j5

Although technology grants us to do many things at once, that doesn’t mean that we’ll do those things well. Concentrating on one thing at a time, it seems, beats multitasking when it comes to doing a job properly.

A study at the University of California found that multitasking impedes the brain's ability to absorb information, while research by Glenn Wilson, visiting professor of psychology at Gresham College, London, showed that people's problem-solving performance dropped by the equivalent of 10 IQ points when they multitasked, and their stress levels also rose.

Recent findings of researchers at Stanford University in California shows that people who routinely multitask are the worst at ignoring irrelevant information. Also they regularly switch between tasks and have poorer short-term memory – in short, all the skills needed to multitask successfully are diminished.

But why, exactly, does multitasking have such a negative effect? According to Dave Crenshaw, business coach and author of The Myth of Multitasking, the damage is caused by what he calls the "switching cost" – the time taken to switch from one task and refocus on another. "You actually take much longer to accomplish things, make more mistakes and increase your stress," he says.

So the experts recommend us to avoid the multitasking wherever we can, “"If you are doing something very important I would suggest it would be better to shut down all channels of communication so you can concentrate fully." Wilson says.

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