Stop multitasking to improve productivity

In today’s world, we check our mobile phones with every beep, buzz and ring; we switch through television channels frequently, we hop and jump from one YouTube video to the other, and we constantly check our social media accounts, from Facebook to Twitter to WhatsApp, all the while trying to engage with our family and catch up on work memos at the same time.

Doctors Cynthia Kubu and Andre Machado highlight that only less than 2.5 percent of humans can truly multitask by doing several activities all at once. The human brain is wired to mono-task. Such singular focus held survival benefits back in ancient times when full attentiveness was needed to concentrate without distraction on safety responses of fight or flight in dangerous environments. This ancient hangover in our psychological capabilities survives as out of step with our modern way of life and work.

So, to compensate, we rapidly switch back and forth between multiple duties. We might feed our babies while talking on the phone to our boss while trying to read a report on the latest financial audit of our firms.

Multitasking holds negative consequences for our lives. Beyond the permanent damage to one’s ability to focus for useful periods of time that can affect the quality of our personal relationships with our loved ones, it also dramatically lowers our concentration and productivity at work. However, the modern workforce makes the downfalls of multitasking even worse in the following four different ways.

First, we do not respect interpersonal boundaries that cause increases in switching rapidly from one task to another and back and forth again. While most co-workers respect time boundaries on phone calls outside work hours, it now proves acceptable to disturb our colleagues at all hours of the day and night through emails and texts. What’s worse is that we often expect a response during these non-work times and we also feel nervous when outside work about what important dialogue may be transpiring without your knowledge, so you check your email and phone frequently. Our whole lives turn into this blended amalgamated mix of never fully being in one sphere of life such as fully present at work or fully present at home. We view personal social media at work and also respond to work emails and texts while at home.

Second, our modern offices do not provide enough quiet uninterrupted spaces for us to concentrate effectively. Despite well publicised classical research by Eric Sundstrom, Robert Burt and Douglas Kamp on open floor plans and distractions in workplaces, many firms still put multiple people in one office or maintain open office plans with just desks and no walls for visual or sound blockage. So we become over stimulated and cannot concentrate or tune out other conversations and other workplace events.

Research by Ipsos and Steelcase found that 95 percent of workers are dissatisfied with the levels of privacy in the workplace while a Canadian study found that workers in open plan offices take 70percent more sick leave than other workers in traditional office settings.

Third, our workplaces and schools force copious amounts of unnecessary teamwork. Here in Kenya, we love forming committees to solve work issues by lengthy consensus building. But Susan Cain in her book highlights that the most creative and productive times for employees occurs during private quiet dedicated work.

Fourth, we bring multitasking chaos upon ourselves even in private. We build in distractions for ourselves when we work alone. Even listening to music while working can prove distracting when trying to generate creative work products according to social scientists Maddie Doyle and Adrian Furnham. Then even when alone in coveted quiet times at work or at home, we still allow ourselves to get interrupted too often by telephone calls, WhatsApp messages, text sms, breaking news apps, and on and on. We must break free from the temptations of interruptions in the modern world. We need to fight unnecessary multitasking and its permanent reconfiguring of our brains with intentional action steps. We should start by blocking off intentional uninterrupted time on specific duties.

Singular activity

As an example, we can allocate our time into 30-minute blocks to focus on only one singular activity such as writing a specific report, developing lesson plans, or calling key clients as examples. Then build in five-minute rewards after each block of time to check messages, emails, and calls. Such single purpose time will feel strange at first, but one’s creativity and output will boost quickly and workers will become accustomed to the new method of working.

We can also tell our colleagues in the office what times we are not available and can only be disturbed for emergencies, such as perhaps 10:00am to 12:00pm dedicated to report completion time. Managers must encourage such structured private work time and disallow mundane frequent interruptions while keeping those to certain times. It requires radical acting behaviour from executives to change organisational culture to improve employee satisfaction and productivity.

Also, we can buy an alternate phone, even a cheap one, for emergencies. We could only give the number to immediate family members and our boss, secretary, and personal assistant so that less urgent calls get filtered to our regular number and only answered or calls returned during allocated times.

We may also only seek employers with architectural floorplans that give some privacy through quieter surroundings or full or partial walls to block visual and audible distractions. Employers can also provide frameworks for appropriate response times to email and other inquiries setting clear rules about not responding during certain hours.