And you? How do you fell about multitasking?
Multitasking defined as the ability to focus on more than one thing at a time doesn’t exist!
For years now that neuroscientists state that multitasking is a human delusion. Yet, it seems that we got fond of the “multitasker” label as a big quality and synonym of success and productivity. However, we could not be more wrong…
For the most part, we simply can’t focus on more than one thing at a time. What we can do, he said, is shift our focus from one thing to the next with astonishing speed. Switching from task to task, you think you’re actually paying attention to everything around you at the same time. But you’re actually not.
Earl Miller, professor of neuroscience at MIT
This buzz word, multitasking, is waved around and thrown at us till the point where you believe you need to be an expert at multitasking. However, truth is that our brain struggles with all this focus switching. Some of us actually experience a raise in their stress and anxiety levels, thus leading to less productivity. And all of this training and pressure to switch focus, on top of a society expert in distraction, is actually leading us to the exact opposite: we are becoming less and less productive and efficient.
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, psychology professor expert in positive psychology, creativity and happiness, conducted a series of studies and established the concept of Flow. Flow is a mental state in which you experience a total immersion in what you are doing. In other words, you are so focused and enjoying what you are doing that you forget the most basic needs such as going to the toilet. When you experience this state of flow is when you are more productive so you see how counter-productive it is to multitask.
These are times of great distraction. Social media, TV, email, the constant information overload we endure, the need to be on top of what is happening (nowism)… With all these channels screaming for our attention, one of the major qualities we need to have to succeed is to focus. Hard as it might be to practice, truth is that focusing is not complicated in theory: you just need to do one thing at a time, as perfect as you can.
Focusing, among other things, implies that you:
know what is more important and urgent and go for it
say no to distractions such as social media
don’t pick up your email every 5 minutes
Like everybody else, and specially being a woman, I seem to tend to multitask a lot. One day, I was searching for a mind map tool because I needed to build one for my master thesis and I stumbled upon the image below. I found it interesting, so interesting that I saved it on my desktop without paying further attention. Recently, 2 years later, I was cleaning my desktop an I found this image again, only this time I actually saw it. Not just looking, but seeing, understanding every part o f it. It is so simple and yet so difficult to carry out. This time, I printed it for me and my team.
As I write this post I am looking at it because I have this image printed below my desktop so that I remember how to stay focused and how much it pays of.
I hope you take a moment to actually see this picture, for this is the best summary of how to stay focused that I’ve ever seen.
http://www.hitcoaching.com/multitasking-big-delusion-successful-people-focused/
2087
blakekathryn
origamiaround
snowghoul
turnnoffyourmind
discoholicmusic
romaincrisis
titsay
theartofmadeline
stormborns
kaledo-art