Why Multitasking Sucks…And Wastes Time

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Multitasking Comes to a Screeching Halt

About a year ago, I was driving my son and I home from a scout meeting. We turned through an intersection and proceeded a few hundred yards forward I looked down to change the radio station. At the same time, the car in front of me decided suddenly that they wanted to turn right into a parking lot and hit their brakes. Lots of noise later, they have a beat up rear-end and my car is totaled. Thankfully, no one was hurt.

A Do Everything World

We all do it. Folding laundry and watching TV. Driving and changing the radio station. Working on the laptop while talking to a co-worker on the phone. Sitting in a meeting and sending an email. Trying to do more than one thing at the same time because we don’t think there are enough hours in the day. It’s called Multitasking and it is the biggest time waster of all!

“Wait”, you might say, “multitasking is a critical part of functioning in work and life today! How can you say that it is a time waster?”

Because it is.

Your Bad Multitasking Self

The idea is that if we are multitasking then we are working on multiple things at the same time, juggling everything and keeping things going. But that’s not what happens. In most cases what happens is it simply means that you are doing multiple things badly.

It doesn’t help that multitasking is encourage by many employers today. First, many companies advertise jobs where they specifically state in the job requirements that they want someone who can effectively multitask. I guess my question is, how exactly do they measure that? Secondly, with layoffs and streamlining, employers tell the survivors they must learn to do more with less, which unfortunately includes less staff. But not less work. While they don’t explicitly say it, they expect you to pick up all the slack and still do it within the same time frames. So your choices at either to put in twice as much time or “multitask”.

The Case Against Multitasking

There are many reasons why multitasking simply doesn’t work. The reasons run from the logical and practical to the medical and psychological. We’ll cover just a few.

First, understand that what you are doing is not actually multitasking. It is actually just task-switching. What it reminds me of is Microsoft Windows operating system on computers. Early versions of Windows offered a way to jump between tasks. You could still only run one thing at a time, but you could jump between applications. That was called task-switching. It wasn’t until later versions where Windows would allow you to actually run multiple applications at the same time. What we do when we allegedly multitask is the first one – we are simply task-switching. Problem is, we aren’t a computer with an operating system designed to do that, so we have a lot more trouble than Windows did jumping from one task to another. And that’s saying something.

Other reasons:

Multitasking does not increase productivity, it decreases it. There is research to suggest that multitasking actually reduces productivity by as much as 40%.
Studies show that task-switching rapidly actually increases the time it takes to complete a task.
Task-switching slows you down because you have to re-align yourself each time you jump to the next task. That means reaction times are slower, so if you are performing any task that requires quick reaction and reflex your performance suffers greatly.
Evidence shows more mistakes are made when multitasking instead of focused work.
Multitasking is stressful. When multi-tasking in a fast-paced environment, your heart rate increases and stays higher longer than normal. There is also emotional stress caused by the fallout of mistakes and failure while multitasking.
We are designed to focus on one thing at a time. Again, lots of research to support this. Health Magazine cites a 2013 University of Utah study that found the better you thought you were at multitasking, the worse you actually were.

In summary, you suck at multitasking. And so do I and so does everyone else.

So, if you were doing something else while you were reading this, stop it until you finish.

Now leave your comments and thoughts.

Okay, now you’re done. Go back to that other thing.

Why You Waste 12 Hours a Day of Your Precious Time

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Too Much Time on Trivia

Spending a little time doing research on this, I wanted to find out what the top time wasters we use are. While opinions vary there are some items that popped up on pretty much everyone’s list and you probably know which ones. That said, let’s look at some of the top daily time wasters and how much time they take.

FACEBOOK
Is it any surprise that this shows up on the list? For many people, their world revolves around Facebook and similar social networks. On a Marketing Charts website article, they report that Americans 18-64 spend an average of 2-3.5 hours per day on social networks. The number slides higher depending on age group and other demographics. Interestingly, business owners spend more time on social networks than non-business owners. In many workplaces, they thought that they had managed this problem early on by blocking social networks. That worked until people got smartphones with Facebook apps. Let’s call it 3.5 hours a day.
EMAIL
Again, no big surprise. What do most people do first thing when they get to work or boot up their computer? Check their email. We check it again an hour later. And then again an hour after that. And again. And again. Many even check it just before they call it a day. It becomes really time-consuming when we receive mailings from a variety of sources with people who want some of our time and/or money. We gotta filter through all that and then read the “urgent” stuff. Another 3 hours per day.
TELEVISIONReally?! But it is so educational! (yes, that was sarcasm) Many will tell you that you should find an alternative, like the wonderful recording features on many systems today. But that just means you will watch it later. Either way you are wasting time. Not too long ago our TV went out and was out for a couple of weeks. We found other things to do. Most peaceful two weeks in a long time. Still wondering why I fixed it. Average of 5 hours per day.

Wow! Let’s stop there. Just in those three items we have 11.5 hours of time spent out of our day. All those things are useful but none of them are critical; if we spend any more than an hour total on any of them we are wasting time. And this does not take into account the time we spend on other things like instant messaging or texting, pointless meetings, various interruptions during the day, generally surfing the web, and procrastinating. But there is one that I think is the most critical, first because I think it is the source of most of the others and second because of the effect it has on us overall. And that time waster is multi-tasking. We will talk about that on Friday.

Get Time Back

Knowledge is great, but action is better. How can we manage this a little better?

If Facebook is not part of your work, then you should invoke a no social networking rule during the work day. Chances are your company does not permit it and even doing it on your smartphone during business hours violates company policy. Besides that, it’s just not right. If you simply must, check it during lunch elsewhere.
If Facebook IS a part of your work, as it is for many small businesses and entrepreneurs, then block time out for it on the schedule in both the morning and afternoon, each one with a 30-minute limit.
Do not, I repeat DO NOT, check your email first thing in the morning. Save it until mid-morning after you have had the opportunity to eat a few frogs. Create a tagging system for marking emails. When you view your inbox, scan the messages and quickly and use your tagging system to mark them as urgent, critical, important, or not important. Urgent emails you respond to immediately, critical emails within a few hours, important emails by the end of the day, and not important emails either get filed or deleted. That allows you to get through it within 30 minutes each time, likely even less. Another thing: nothing stays in the inbox. Act on it, file it, or delete it.
This one is easy. Make TV time earned. Works for children, it will work for you. Half-hour segments of TV time is earned by meeting objectives or goals. Or do it by program if you wish. Either way, the idea is that you don’t watch TV unless you have earned it by accomplishment. Better yet, just keep it off and find something else to entertain you. Delegate the time to personal growth. Read a book or watch a webinar. Remember the caveat

Really successful people have large libraries and small televisions.

No matter whether you work for a large or small company, are a business owner, network marketer, run a charity, or manage a household; getting things done is a matter of managing the things that can waste your time. Knowing what they are and developing systems to handle them in definitive periods of time will go a long way towards making your day more productive and helping you find time for things you enjoy.

Action Plan

Buy a journal or notebook and document your time from the moment you wake up until you go to bed. Do this for at least three days but preferably a week. Include everything, no matter how insignificant it might seem. What you want is a good idea of how you are spending ALL your time.
Total up the time you spend per day on non-critical things like the activities above. Remember, social networking is not essential unless you use it to market yourself or your business IS social networking.
Create time limits and block out time on the schedule for those activities. Make sure that the beginning of the day is spent doing critical activities for the day, especially the ones you don’t really want to do or procrastinate on (eating the bullfrogs).
Follow the new schedule for 3-5 days and again document your activities. How much free time did you discover? Were you more productive and effective?

Three Ways to See the Value of Your Time

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Time Wasting

You are wasting time.

We all do to an extent, but the more successful people minimize wasted time and know how to get the most out of the same 24 hours daily that you and I have. Yes, many work long hours, that is true. Yes, many work weekends as well, that also is true. However, there are lots of people who work long hours including weekends and don’t get near as much done. It’s a matter of getting more value from your time because you understand the value of your time.

In my postings on social networks today, I shared a quote from M. Scott Peck. Peck was a psychiatrist and also an author. His most famous book is The Road Less Traveled. A lot of what he wrote about over the years was fulfillment and he was a big advocate of leading a disciplined life. He also believed in understanding your worth. The quote I shared today was

Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until your value your time, you won’t do anything valuable with it.

Understanding the value of our time begins with understanding the value of those things, including us, that take up that time. Here are a few considerations to help you understand the value of your time:

My friend Kevin McCarthy developed the concept of the On-Purpose Person (you can buy the book on Amazon). The foundation behind it is that we have to determine what our purpose is and once we understand that we have to plan our actions to make sure they are in alignment with our purpose. In other words, you must be On-Purpose. Kevin uses a light switch as an avatar to remind you to evaluate whether what you are doing is on purpose or off purpose. While sometimes off-purpose can be a good thing, what we look to do is make more of our actions on-purpose. So, in other words, when you understand your purpose, you attach value to yourself and your time. Being On-Purpose is making sure that you are doing something valuable with that time.
If you lean more towards the pragmatic, you can do the math. If you calculate out the dollar value of your time, then you understand better how much that time is costing you each time you waste it. There are lots of internet sites to show you how to calculate it out, but the simplest one I found was on The Simple Dollar. You figure out your take home pay from last year and subtract out all expenses associated with working, such as child care, transportation costs, etc. Divide that by the actual number of hours you devote to working each year, including commuting time and all. That gives you an actual dollar value per hour. So everytime you look at an activity, evaluate it by how much it is costing you using that figure. You may find yourself leaving out a lot more less productive uses of you time.
Be both sides of the customer/business relationship. As a customer, how do you feel when service in the restaurant is slow, when the doctor makes you sit 30 minutes in the waiting room, when the repair shop doesn’t have your car ready when promised, when someone promises to deliver something to you by a certain time and then doesn’t come through. You probably, if you are like most, display anything from displeasure to outright rage. Someone has not valued your time and you WILL NOT TOLERATE IT. But you do the same to yourself. When you choose to put off productive tasks, to pick activities that look busy but actually don’t get you any closer to your goals or tasks, or simply choose to do something entirely unproductive, then you are treating yourself like that restaurant did, like the doctor’s office, like the repair shop, or the dozens of others who may have let you down today. Insist on quality productive time out of yourself and believe in the value of your time.

The Strongest Time Management Tool You Have

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Finding the Time

There’s lots of information out there about time management and how to find more time and get the best out of your available time. In our world, we have lots of things that demand our time and want a piece of our day.

Our work which can take 40 or more hours a week
Our house which demands we clean it occasionally
Our family which would like meals every now and then
Our kid that would like us to take them to dance class
Our other kid that would like us to them to football practice
Our other other kid who would like a playdate
Our elderly parents who would like use to drop by and help them with something
Our church committee that wants us to volunteer to help out with the rummage sale
Our spouse who would like us to pay a little attention to them while they tell us about THEIR day
The dog who would like to go for a walk
Our laundry that needs to be washed
Our friend who would like to catch up over coffee/beer
Our local charity that wants us to participate in a fund raiser

And the list goes on. From the moment we rise until we collapse exhausted in our bed, there are demands on our time. They come at us from all directions and call us to action on their behalf. And we respond, because we are people of action and people of action take action when called upon in the service of others, right?

So, how do you deal with all that? Isn’t there some special trick or time management technique that is going to help me get all this in? Isn’t that some super secret technique that I can apply that will help me manage and free up my time?

The Time Management Solution

Well, as a matter of fact, there is! This is actually a secret that has been available for centuries but little used as of late. In fact, it seems like many people aren’t even aware of this secret, not even sure of its existence. It is both simple and hard. But if you apply it constructively, you will be amazed at how much time it will free up. Do you wanna know what this secret is; the key to handling your time with skill and clarity?

Here it is.

Listen up!

Come closer!

The secret is:

Say NO.

That simple. NO. When someone says, you are such a go-getter can I convince you take on another project for our church committee?

NO.

You don’t owe an explanation. They are not entitled to one.

You are not an evil person for saying NO. You are not selfish. In fact, you are being considerate and caring. You are wanting to save yourself for the things where you can really add value by choosing the places you serve and when you serve. A Mayo Clinic report even suggests that learning to say NO is healthy, allowing you to be at your best for others.

The key is you are naturally not going to say NO to everything. You are, however, going to say NO when the activity is not the best use of your time, talents, and abilities. You will say YES where the opportunities to serve allow you to provide maximum value. As John Maxwell says, you must learn to

Say NO to the good so you can say YES to the best!

Years ago, I was asked by my church to serve as the church treasurer. A high profile role and I was lured by the promise that such a position would bring me to the forefront of the lay leadership within the church. Now, I will likely never be known as a financial wizard. My wife, Sherry, balances the checkbook and handles accounts. She is good at that. I am not and don’t really want to be. Despite all that, I said yes.

Big mistake. Because of my lack of skill, it took way too long to complete any of the responsibilities of the role. Balancing accounts became an all-nighter. This was not made easier by my general distaste for doing any of it anyway. So my motivation waned, the job suffered, and eventually I left the role by mutual agreement. I said yes to the wrong thing. It was not the best use of my skills and abilities and did not allow me to provide maximum value to the church, so we all suffered as a result.

Employ the secret. Say NO. Expect the best out of yourself and refuse to be placed where you cannot give it.

Do yourself and others a big favor and employ the strongest time management tool you have: you ability to make a choice.

Say NO to the good so you can say YES to the best.

Time Thieves: How to Steal it Back

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Re-setting Time

This past week was the time for most where we change our clocks to end Daylight Saving Time. I remembered it always, as many did, by the phrase “Spring Forward, Fall Back“. Of course, most of us don’t have to worry about it much anymore as our computers and smartphones will do it for us. That, and a few years ago I got one of those alarm clocks that automatically adjusts for Daylight Saving Time. After that, my only chore is to go re-set the ones that don’t automatically adjust.

The gist of it for us is that we theoretically “gained an hour” this weekend. Never mind that we really just get back the one we lost in the Spring, everyone looks at as gaining an hour.

So here’s a question for you:

how much more productive did that “extra hour” make you this weekend?

Since it occurs in the middle of the night, likely the only benefit most see from it is the extra hour of sleep (that you lost in the Spring). Some, like me, got up at the same time as always, usually around 5 a.m., and followed our normal routine. Being a weekend, many were taking time off from being really productive anyway; but even if we weren’t it is doubtful that the extra hour made us any more productive. It has more to do than just with the fact that the change occurs in the middle of the night.

Time is Not Important

Time is not what makes us productive. With each tick of the clock, time passes no matter what. Twenty-four hours and today becomes yesterday, tomorrow becomes today. That’s all any of us ever have; from the President of the United States to the most successful person in your organization to the least productive person you know. Everyone has 24 hours in a day. Yet, many times, our time is frittered away with things like

Constantly checking our Facebook page (this has become one of the biggest wasters around)
Playing games, either online, on a smartphone or tablet, or on a game box
Television (and most of it is trash)
Procrastinating
Going to meetings
Being somewhere else in our mind other than where we are
Running in multiple directions throughout the day

There is, of course, much more but that is a good start.

Your 110

A good friend of mine and a very wise person, Jeff Bigby of Awaken the Nation, shows the math of our time in his presentations. Jeff asks his workshop participants about how they spend their 110. See, Jeff points out the following formula on your weekly schedule:

There are 168 hours in a week
- We spend an average of 56 hours sleeping (assuming you are sleeping eight hours)
- We spend 40 hours working (or more, not including the commute)
- About two hours a day in meals for a total of 14 hours per week
- That leaves about 58 hours per week.
- Go to church? Let’s say two hours. That’s 56 left or 8 hours a day.

110 hours a week is manageable time

So, in that eight hours a day we have “administrative” things we have to do during the day, plus whatever else we want to do to. Reading, family time, devotional/meditation time, community service, watching television, etc. The point is that there is a part of your week you have limited control over. Most of us NEED eight hours of sleep a night. Most of us MUST work 8 hours a day for five days a week. Eating 3-5 regular meals a day is CRITICAL to good health (as is eating the right things)! So we have 110 hours a week over which we have almost total control!

So the issue is not time; it is how productively you are using that time. You cannot manage time, no matter how hard you try. So, what do you manage?

Manage YOU Not Time

I am no different from you on this. I waste time pretty much every day. But I have become aware of that and aware of my ability to make choices in changing that and examining my time wasters. If I can do that, I am extremely confident that you can too. Here’s some of the things I am doing to help bring that under control:

Prioritize and Categorize
Establish things into areas of must do, should do, nice to do for the week. Ideally, do this on Sunday night or Monday morning. Within each of those categorize them based on the part of your life they address; such as work project, family, health, etc. Within each category, number them based on importance. The importance is determined by time constraint, critical stage, or just your own personal plan.
The Daily Big Three
Each morning, or the night before, list the top three things you need to carry out that day. Take the top items of each category and place them on your list. Number those according to importance. There may be more than three, but the point is that you don’t go to bed tonight without accomplishing the Big Three. Place the bullfrogs at the top of the list; the things you procrasitate on or simply hate to do. Get them out of the way first thing and the rest of the day will be pleasant by comparison.
Self-Talk
It doesn’t matter what others say to us, it matters what we say to ourselves. Encourage yourself. Talk yourself up. Remember what you are made of. Many of your tasks will be things you don’t want to do, have often gone out of your way to avoid, and might even be incredibly boring. If you don’t talk yourself up, you will simply find another excuse.
Reward System
For each item accomplished, provide a reward of some type. It should be a reward that is quick, easy, and yet provides incentive. If you are a Facebook fanatic, each item completed earns you 15 minutes of Facebook time. Now, for that to be a real incentive has to mean that you aren’t getting Facebook time without accomplishing the task. If you are going to do it anyway, it’s no incentive.
Consequences
Sometimes one of the big three does not get accomplished due to something out of our control, but that’s a rarity. Either way, fault or not, provide a consequence for not completing one of the big three. Just like providing consequences for your kids, it has to be timely, connected, and reasonable. For example, I read about what person who uses the consequence that when he doesn’t accomplish his tasks he wakes himself up in the middle of the night to work for an hour or two. He values his sleep so much that it provides him incentive to manage himself better and avoid that consequence. Be careful, though; if you find yourself administering a consequence too much it starts to lose its impact. Change them up from time to time.
Analyze
At the end of the week, take a look back and see how things have gone. Did things go better or worse? Where could things have gone better? Why? How could you do it differently? What can you tell yourself to help make it better?

So this is a little system I use for me. How about you? How do you manage yourself daily? Got tips and tricks? Be a river and not a reservoir! Share them here