Do You Multitask?
Do You Multitask?
By Rosanne D’Ausilio, Ph.D.
Does this ever happen to you? Do you feel overworked? Overwhelmed? Overtired? Most of us are busier than ever. We’re doing our jobs, plus sometimes the jobs of one or two gone-but-not-replaced colleagues – and doing it all with less support. The Institute for the Future finds that employees of Fortune 1,000 companies send and receive 178 messages a day and are interrupted an average of at least three times an hour.
How many of you take several calls at once, jockeying back and forth trying to keep each conversation separate (and remember where you left off each time)? Or how often are you on the phone with a caller, text chatting with another, and coaching your co-worker all at the same time?
“Do more with less,” is the unforgiving mantra of business in the contact center industry today. Make more decisions and get more stuff done – with fewer people and less resources. It’s reported in a study by the Families and Work Institute in New York conducted on 1,003 employees that 45 percent of US workers feel they are asked or expected to work on too many tasks at once. Is this true for you?
How do we do it? We become very good at multitasking. We do it everywhere – largely because of technology. But does this mean you have less time to do real work? How do you manage to stay sane in the face of these crazy demands?
A growing body of scientific research shows that multitasking can actually make you less efficient. Trying to do two or three things at once or in quick succession can take longer overall than doing them one at a time, and may leave you with reduced brainpower to perform each task. That is why most call centers have their agents take only one call at a time.
Research shows that multitasking increases stress, diminishes perceived control, and may cause physical discomfort such as stomachaches or headaches not to mention shoddy work, mismanaged time, rote solutions, and forgetfulness. Have you ever noticed that as you are working on one task – or one call, thoughts about another task – or the caller on hold – creep into your consciousness?
It doesn’t mean we can’t do several things at the same time, but we’re kidding ourselves if we think we can do so without a cost. Our brains allow us to appear as though we can comfortably multitask. We do have an excellent filtering mechanism to switch our attention rapidly from one thought to the next. At the same time, rather than lose unattended thoughts, this mechanism keeps them active in the recesses of the brain. However, the more we juggle, the less efficient we become at performing any one task. And the longer we go before returning to an interrupted task, the harder it is to remember just where we left off. Multitasking diminishes our productivity and makes us work harder just to feel like we are barely keeping up.
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