Why Multitasking Wastes Time and Money

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: