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Why Multitasking Wastes Time and Money

Jeffrey Strain

Eating lunch while typing up that email. Making a phone call while driving to that next appointment.

Multitasking. We've all attempted it, in one way or another, in an attempt to save a little time and help boost our productivity -- and make a little money. With today's technology and huge amounts of information to process, attempting to accomplish two things at once in order to better balance work and pleasure is often difficult to avoid.

But while there is an automatic assumption that multitasking helps a person to be more productive, the opposite is often true. In fact, one study of professionals and office workers found that 28% of the subjects' "time was spent on what they deemed interruptions and recovery time before they returned to their main tasks." The study said this lost time cost companies roughly $650 billion a year in lost productivity.

Since productivity often has a major impact on your personal finances, it's essential to understand why you may be hurting yourself by multitasking even when you think you are improving your time management.

Here are some of the ways that multitasking makes you less efficient:

Easy to get sidetracked: If you are working on the computer and you get an email notification, you may decide to take a few seconds to address the email. The problem is that those few seconds that you intended to spend on the email will likely turn into many minutes, as you check other messages, click on links to Web sites and inadvertently begin working on other tasks, according to Shamsi Iqbal, a computer science researcher at the University of Illinois.

In a study on the habits of Microsoft(MSFT Quote) employees, Iqbal and Eric Horvitz, a former Microsoft colleague, found that workers took "... on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming email or instant messages."

Procrastination: When you have a choice of things that you are working on, it's likely that you will choose the one that is most pleasant to do, rather than the one that may be most important to get done.

Dangerous: Studies show that doing more than one simple task at the same time can slow down reaction time by a second. While a second may not seem like a lot of time, it could be the difference between life and death for someone driving a car while talking on the phone. Another study shows that talking on the phone, whether handheld or hands-free, while driving is just as dangerous as driving drunk.

Hampers Learning: When you are doing more than one task at the same time, you won't be able to concentrate as hard, which will result in reduced learning. "Even if you learn while multi-tasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily," wrote Russell Poldrack, an associate professor of psychology at UCLA, in a study.

Inferior Work: If you type while talking on the phone, your document will likely show your lack of concentration and not be the quality you usually produce. It will increase your chances of mistakes, since any disruption will usually have a negative effect on processing information.

Remedies

So now that you know that multitasking is making you less instead of more efficient, here are five simple steps you can take to improve your productivity by cutting out the temptation of multitasking:

One at a Time: If you have developed the habit of multitasking, it may take some effort to break. Set aside blocks of time each day to work exclusively on one specific task. With a little practice and organization, you should find that you will be able to accomplish a lot more during these concentrated time blocks than you have been able to while multitasking.

Prioritize: To avoid procrastination and to make sure that the most important tasks get completed in a timely manner, make a list each day of which tasks need to be addressed. By working on the most important tasks in the priority order you determine, you have a work list that will help you avoid hopping from task to task.

Set Aside Time: If there are tasks you find consistently interrupting your main priorities, put limits on them. For example, break your habit of checking your email throughout the day and set aside a specific time for it in the morning, afternoon and evening.

Cut Out Interruptions: Reduce the likelihood of any interruptions that can get you sidetracked. If you are at your desk, working on your computer, turn off your instant messenger, lock out your email alerts and let coworkers know you are busy. If you find you need additional information to complete the task you're working on, make a list of everything and hold off to the end so you can gather it all at once.

Divide and Conquer: Research shows that resuming your work is more difficult if you have been interrupted while doing it rather than at a scheduled break. When you have large projects to work on, divide them into smaller parts. Instead of blocking off a full day to work on a project, reserve six one-hour blocks of time to work on specific areas. If you are interrupted, it will make it much easier to get back to the tasks at hand.