Positive Effects Of Multitask

Despite the fact that multitasking is becoming more and more popular, only 2% of people are actually successful multitaskers and suffer no drop off in their work quality while working (Sundem). With that being said, I contend that multitasking shouldn’t be as commonplace as it is, as the negative effects it takes on your brain simply far outweigh the positive feelings of thinking you are doing more with your time even when it reality you are actually delaying your progress by multitasking. At first glance and without actually diving into the science of it, it is easily comprehensible as to why people of this era and era’s past chose to multitask. There are only so many hours in a day, and more often than not are schedules are so full that

“When you engage in one task at a time, the prefrontal cortex works in harmony with other parts of the brain, but when you toss in another task it forces the left and right sides of the brain to work independently. The process of splitting our attention usually leads to mistakes” (McClurgy). Simply, whenever we multitask, the brain takes in new information, and that causes us to lose focus. We all believe that we have the cognitive ability to do a multitude of things all at once, but Gazzaley says that we have a puzzling tendency to overrate and embellish our own ability to multitask. “An example is when you attempt to check your email while on a conference call,” says Gazzaley. “The act of doing that makes it so incredibly obvious how you can’t really parallel process two attention-demanding tasks. You either have to catch up and ask what happened in the conversation, or you have to read over the email before you send it — if you’re wise!” (McClurgy). To say that multitasking is something we should avoid doing simply because of the dropoff in the quality of our

If the interviewee doesn’t, they can simply type the question into one of the multitude of search engines available online, and their question will be answered. One of the most common questions for interviewers asks, in some variety, of the applicant 's ability to multitask. While they typically view multitasking as a bonus on an applicant’s resume, interviewers should beware, as multitasking actually does more harm than good. There have been several studies that show us that our brains are actually “dumbed down” while multitasking. At the University Of London, researchers found that multitaskers suffer IQ reduction comparable to how they would had they missed a night of sleep (Giang). With that being said, although multitaskers feel like they are being more productive and more efficient, the opposite is actually true, as multitaskers are shown to be working at a much lower cognitive level and costing companies billions of dollars in lost productivity. The negative effects don’t stop there if, for instance, your job is centered around interaction with the customer or people in general. If you’re a worker in this field, you should especially be mindful of your multitasking tendencies, “as a study that ran MRI scans on the brains of multitaskers found they had less brain density in areas that