"It felt like a superpower, this ability to keep all those plates spinning at once. But here's the uncomfortable truth I discovered: that superpower was actually my kryptonite. Every time I thought I was being ultra-productive by doing three things at once, my brain was secretly running a marathon just to keep up with the constant switching. The result? Everything took longer, contained more mistakes, and left me mentally exhausted by lunch."
"Think your brain works like a computer with multiple tabs open? Think again. When you're "multitasking," you're not actually doing multiple things simultaneously. Your brain is frantically switching between tasks, and each switch comes with a cost. Travis Bradberry, an emotional intelligence expert, puts it bluntly: "Multitasking reduces your efficiency and performance because your brain can only focus on one thing at a time.""
"I learned this the hard way during a particularly chaotic week when I was trying to write an article while responding to Slack messages and half-listening to a podcast for "research." What should have been a two-hour writing project stretched into five hours of mediocre work. The article needed major revisions, I missed important details in the Slack conversations, and I couldn't recall a single insight from that podcast."
Multitasking is not true parallel processing; the brain switches rapidly between tasks rather than handling them simultaneously. Task switching imposes cognitive costs that slow work, increase errors, and cause mental exhaustion. Personal experience shows a two-hour writing task stretched into five hours when combined with messaging and passive podcast listening, yielding mediocre output, missed details, and no retained insights. Research indicates multitasking can reduce efficiency by up to 40 percent. Emotional intelligence experts note that the brain can focus on only one thing at a time, so attempting multiple tasks in quick succession undermines overall performance and productivity.
Read at Silicon Canals
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