From the course: Time Management Fundamentals

Reducing the costs of switchtasking

From the course: Time Management Fundamentals

Reducing the costs of switchtasking

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Multitasking, or more accurately switch-tasking, forces us to pay switching costs, hidden time expenses we pile up hundreds of times per day. There are three main switching costs to switch-tasking. First, the amount of time it takes to complete things increases, in some cases up to twice as long as the first time. Consider an everyday occurrence. You're responding to an e-mail from a coworker. you're crafting a careful response, and then a text message comes in. Most will stop typing the e-mail and check the message. They send a quick reply, then they have to return to the e-mail and do what? Reread what they wrote, get their mind in the right place, and continue writing. This costs a lot of extra time, maybe a five-minute loss or more. And when you consider Microsoft research found that workers on average switch apps 566 times per day, you can see how lost time starts to accumulate. Second, the quality of the work decreases or the likelihood of mistakes increases. How many times at work have you seen someone given very clear instructions, yet they still messed it up? Frustrating, right? As I consult companies, I found that when intelligent people make obvious mistakes. It's almost always a symptom of switch-tasking, not incompetence. The third cost of switch-tasking is stress. Switch-tasking makes everything more stressful, even with something as simple as copying numbers and letters on a piece of paper. We have so many ways to reduce stress and so many time-saving devices, and yet we're more stressed than we've ever been. A big part of that is because of the cultural acceptance of switch tasking. Switch tasking is a thief. But the good news, when you reduce switches, you'll have more free time, you'll make fewer mistakes, and you'll feel less stress.

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