Workplace
The Multitasking Myth
Research now suggests that multitasking isn’t the key to maximizing your productivity. So stop what you’re doing and pay attention
FEEL AS THOUGH YOU’RE constantly juggling projects and clients? Does your plate overfloweth with more to-dos than you can possibly get done in a workday? If you’re spread thin trying to get everything on your list checked off, you’re far from alone. Mark Whitmore, manag- ing partner at Deloitte in Toronto and member of its Canadian executive team, deals with more than 250 emails and goes to about a dozen meetings a day, plus he leads 300 partners and 3,000 professionals. Another busy businessper- son, Carlo Sistilli, is CFO with Arista Homes Limited, a homebuilder in the Greater Toronto Area. He heads up
16 | CPA MAGAZINE | MARCH 2015
accounting, finance and IT and can receive more than 100 emails daily. Sistilli says, “I have as many as 10 items on my daily to-do list but I’m oſten sidetracked to deal with problems and special projects as they arise.” Sound familiar? In today’s workplace,
we have two big problems. The first: we are drinking from a fire hose of info. “We take in five times more information today than we did in 1986,” says Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal and author of The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. The second problem? We’re spending far too much
time and energy trying to cope with information overload and our growing to-do lists by juggling too many things at a time. Interestingly, a large body of neuroscience finds that when we multitask, we actually accomplish less and can feel really tired and stressed out at the end of the day. Switching back and forth fractures attention and burns up glucose, the fuel that brain cells need to work. “So if aſter a bunch of switching, you feel like your head has been in a salad spinner, that’s why,” Levitin says. Multitasking also releases the stress hormone cortisol, which can cause foggy thinking and anxiety and leads to the release of adrenaline — a.k.a. the fight or flight hormone — which is handy in the animal kingdom, but it doesn’t have a place in the office. Even worse, brain studies find that multitasking causes
Mike Constable
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