If you’re busy, unnecessary multitasking is costing you around 50% of your time, energy and long-term capability development. This short series exposes how big the impact is and how to escape a lot of it.
Mental Setup Time
We don’t realise it, but it takes the human brain a lot of time and energy to reach deep concentration on a challenging task.
So every time we interrupt a task, we have to incur the bulk of (and often even more than) that mental setup time again, when we return to it later.
The cost of multitasking
Care to hazard a guess how long it takes to reach deep concentration on a challenging task?
Well, it depends on what the task is, how high our energy levels are and how tired and distracted we are, but for the average white collar manager or knowledge worker, it’s between twelve and twenty-five minutes from a standing start.
If you’re heading in the opposite direction before switching to the new task (i.e. doing a task that requires a different skill set), it will probably take longer: quite a bit longer, because of the time it takes to dismantle the neural grid required for the previous task – and then set a different one up for the new task.
Let’s call it fifteen minutes to keep things simple.
How many times an hour do you interrupt incomplete tasks to work on something else, answer a face-to-face query, take a phone-call, respond to a text message or attend a meeting?
Multiply that by fifteen to get a feel for how much time those interruptions and task-switches are costing you.
Small change- huge gain
Now work out how much time you would save if you could make one – yes, just one – less switch per hour. Two hours a day, right? (15 min x 8 in an 8 hour day).
In a five-day week you could save ten hours – or rather, free up 10 hours to use as you see fit – every week.
And that’s just reducing the number of unnecessary task-switches per hour by one!
Immediate benefits
Just being aware of the cost of multitasking will help you reduce it significantly – but I’ll share some simple techniques (that you already know how to use) that will give you an even bigger gain in the next few posts.
Clients and teams that have implemented the techniques have got huge benefits: you will, too!
In the mean-time, click here to watch the video, if you like.
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