Why You May Want to Ditch Those Multitasking Skills

Author: Natasha Riley-Noah / Source: Lifehack

Cognitive neuroscientists and psychologists over the world have repeatedly proven that ‘multitasking’ is a myth.

There are about 2.5% of people, according to a test done by David Strayer and Jason Watson from the University of Utah and the University of Denver at Colorado, that are indeed ‘supertaskers’.

The rest of us are in the majority; we are of the 97% of folks that need to accept that our performance will be better when we focus on one thing at a time, or what other researchers have called ‘switch-tasking’.

Basically, ‘multitasking skills’ aren’t actually as real as we thought and when they are real, it’s rare that those skills exist in everyday people. These skills when they do exist in someone makes them a ‘supertasker’.

You may have been told that women are great, natural multitaskers because we think to set the laundry before putting the casserole in the oven since both will take about the same amount of time to finish. Due to the magic of having two tasks completed in the same allotment of time, we have been dubbed with the talent that doesn’t actually exist.

But just because we thought to do those two things above, and write an article while backing up client work on redundant servers and update two laptop computers for new staff to pick up tomorrow – again, because all take the same around the same amount of time to complete, is this an advantage?

Is ‘multitasking’ even a special skill?

Science seems to keep saying no or only for a very special few. But it’s easy to see why we’ve adopted such a mistaken name for getting lots of different things finished in the same allotment of time, and why it has made some people feel special.

Heck, it fooled me for years.

But look a little more closely at what is really happening with the work at home, freelancing, ‘multitasking’ phenom of a person (let’s not be sexist), that thinks to get all these items checked off her list in roughly the same two hours.

And, to be fair, let’s compare them to the person who decides that they will only focus on writing the article for two hours and leave those other items for later.

It will become apparent to anyone that the quality of the article done by the multitasker will be different, and has more propensity to be of lower quality, than that of the fully focused freelancer.

Why is that?

Switching focus leaves more margin for errors, in quality, sure, but from just a physiological standpoint, in actual effort.

Think of our phenom, faking her focus on her article trying to give each sentence its due, while clicking on the backup tab as the client’s data transfers, listening for the oven and laundry machine chimes and trying to think of a snazzier headline than that of the other guy that wrote an article like this one.

Whereas, our fully focused freelancer uses the time to get into a flow, thinking of all the articles she’s read and reviewed on the subject, thinking of her own life, and putting more aspects of what she’s been exposed to in each sentence she types.

She is putting her efforts, physically and mentally, into the article in a way that may lessen her need for a thesaurus, flipping to search engines for fleshing out ideas for points and she can draft it out in a much fuller way with a tone specific to her own writing voice – which is valuable in a world with our internet!