What If You Want To Be More Productive‪?‬ The What If Experience

I’m hungry for productivity. I want ways to get more done in less time. We all do. Time is one of our most limited resources in the day and age. The are thousands of articles, books, systems, workshops and products geared toward making us more productive. One of the things we all do to get more done is multitask. Whether it’s geared toward increasing work output or just that we’re afraid we’ll miss something if we don’t, we tend to multitask our way through life.
We listen to podcasts or television while we cook. We scroll facebook while we watch Netflix. We talk or listen while we drive or walk. We listen to a webinar while we answer emails. We email while we’re in a meeting. My son watches or listens to YouTube while he plays games on his computer. And he’s not alone.
Dr. Clifford Nass, a psychology professor at Stanford University, says (and I’m quoting from an interview on NPR), “the top 25 percent of Stanford students are using four or more media at one time whenever they're using media. So when they're writing a paper, they're also Facebooking, listening to music, texting, Twittering, et cetera. And that's something that just couldn't happen in previous generations even if we wanted it to.”
Lest you think this is just a new media problem or a bash technology episode, it’s not. This quote, “To do two things at once is to do neither.” Wasn’t said by a 21st-century researcher. It’s attributed to Publilius Syrus, a Roman slave in the first century B.C. Obviously, this issue of multitasking has been around long before smartphones. I routinely walked around with an open book in front of my face reading when I was a kid. I know this has always been an issue for me. Let’s take the lid off though and see how effective it actually is.
First, I need to say that you can go ahead and consider yourself a fantastic multi-tasker. You absolutely are. Supremely talented even. Because you’re breathing, moving, walking, reaching, digesting your lunch, doing all sorts of things that are involuntary and second nature while you’re accomplishing tasks that take more thought.
It’s the more complex tasks, the ones that take more thought that tend to trip us up, though. We think we can do several of those at the same time. But, we actually can’t. I mean it might look like I’m listening to a podcast and cooking a new recipe for dinner, but I’m actually not multi-tasking. I’m switch-tasking. My brain is doing only one of those things at the same time. It’s switching back and forth between the two tasks. It’s doing so pretty quickly, but it’s only actually processing information from one of those activities at a time. If I really think about that, I know it’s true.
If I’m doing something I don’t use a recipe for, something like a stir-fry, where I’m just chopping vegetables and not measuring, reading a recipe or following a real instructional list, it’s much easier to listen to something and cook. There’s a good chance I’m more distracted than I think I am though because I’ll routinely forget to include something I’d intended to.
If I’m following a recipe, though, it’s much tougher. I’ll re-read. I’ll lose track of where I am, I’ll realize that I’ve either done one or the other thing. I’ve either read and understood the recipe or I’ve listened to the audio. I’ll often miss audio while I’m paying attention to the recipe or have to re-read the recipe because I was paying attention to the audio.
Generally, a loss in productivity or forgetting to put the mushrooms in a stir-fry just means dinner takes a little longer to cook and I have mushrooms for an omelet in the morning. But, that loss of productivity is a bigger deal at work.
Conservative estimates are that we have a 40% loss in productivity when we multitask. We might think we’re being more efficient, but we’re not. A 40% loss. That’s a big deal.
Actually, the news is worse than that. Studie