It was a very busy day; the first thing she did as soon as she settled down for the day’s work was to attend to the numerous emails. But she did not have the luxury of answering the first email before the desktop phone buzzed to life. It was her boss calling to find out if she had sent the Excel document. Yet, she was on the phone with the boss when a colleague rushed in; he needed her to sign a document–urgently. To drive the point home, the shrill tone of her cellphone hidden somewhere on her stuff-strewn desk added to the tasks demanding for attention.

More than ever before, firms recognize the need to be competitive. And to be competitive, firms must demand more from employees–to be more global, more customer-responsive, more flexible, more team-driven, more learning-oriented and more productive. But these demands, in most cases, outstrips the resources to meet them. Now in an economy where unemployment is rampant, employees have no choice but to perform at levels that may be impossible to sustain over time. Clearly, as Dave Ulrich-a human resource expert at the University of Michigan observed, the effects of these demands cannot be ignored.

Generally speaking, when people including most workers are faced with the need to do more in the same amount of time with often unexpected orders coming at them throughout the day, they tend to juggle several projects at the same time. Multitasking is the attempt to perform two or more tasks simultaneously and it can be found in almost every job environment now and in other spheres of life.
Folks who take pride in their multitasking ability feels they are getting more done in less time. But studies conducted by Margaret W. Matlin (2013) – “Cognition,” shows “that when multitasking, people make more mistakes or perform their tasks more slowly.” The reason for this is rooted in “the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether deemed subjective or objective, while ignoring other perceivable information.” This is called “attention” and in the opinion of Andersen, John R. (2004), “it is the allocation of limited processing resources.” Do not forget, to perform a task, attention must be divided among all of the component tasks. This is one way of spreading yourself out so thin you deliver mediocre performances.

Here is the all-important question: Is the human brain structured to multitask-that is capable of focusing on several projects at the same time? A 2000 study by Naveh-Benjamin and colleagues based on “The effects of divided attention on encoding and retrieval processes,” arrived at the conclusion that “the brain cannot attend to two or more attention-rich stimuli at the same time.” For folks who did not get that; it is another way of saying that multitasking does not work.
Learn more on:
http://zemellive.com/multitasking-myth-or-reality/