This is Part Two of a four-part series about our modern-day addiction to busyness. Here, Ray Williams discusses busyness and the link to productivity.
Busyness and Productivity
“Nowadays we’re expected to accomplish much more with our time,” says David Levy, Ph.D., professor at the School of Information at the University of Washington. In an attempt to get extra work done, we “multitask,” always trying to do two or three things at the same time. So we may eat our fast-food lunch and conduct business calls while we’re driving or checking our email. Rarely do we focus our attention on just one task anymore.” A big negative to all this multitasking, he adds, is that it is far more intellectually draining than single-tasking.
David Meyer from the University of Michigan published a study that showed that switching what you’re doing mid-task increases the time it takes you to finish both tasks by 25%. “Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes,” Meyer said.
Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.
Microsoft decided to study this phenomenon in their workers and found that it took people an average of 15 minutes to return to their important projects (such as writing reports or computer code) every time they were interrupted by emails, phone calls or other messages. They didn’t spend the 15 minutes on the interrupting messages, either; the interruptions led them to stray to other activities, such as surfing the Web for pleasure.
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When you try to do two things at once, your brain lacks the capacity to perform both tasks successfully. In a breakthrough study, René Marois and his colleagues at Vanderbilt University used MRIs to successfully pinpoint a physical source for this bottleneck. “We are under the impression that we have this brain that can do more than it can,” Marois explained. We’re so enamored with multitasking that we think we’re getting more done, even though our brains aren’t physically capable of this. Regardless of what we might think, we are most productive when we manage our schedules enough to ensure that we can focus effectively on the task at hand. That implies doing less not doing more. “Busy” People are Actually not that Productive – Quartz
