In my humble opinion, I think that multitasking is the biggest enemy of all. It will make us procrastinate our work, make us lazy and keep lots of items pending in our action list. Today I wanted to write on this topic because I guess I'm having this problem with me right now. For the past 1 year when I started involving myself in many activities, I have been noticing this. I have lost focus on the thing that I'm good at and also I have kept so many things pending. In the past year, I'm able to see something inside me which is not me.
During my young age, I was highly interested and fantasized about multitasking. I always had a thought that we will be a hero if we multitask and it also makes us complete lots of work if we make us our resources concurrently. Now after so many years of trial and error, I get good clarity that multitasking is very bad and it will mess up so many things. For the past few years, I have lived a life trying to do lots of multi tasking without proper focus on a particular activity. Due to this, I also found it very difficult to bring a routine to my life.
I personally believe that multitasking creates lots of distractions. I would like to explain my points with the help of an example. If we are doing some work on our laptop, we should be doing that work only. This is something that I learned the hard way. If we try to listen to songs while doing something, I realized that my focus was half on my work and a half on the songs. After some time a higher percentage of my focus will go to listening to songs and I easily get distracted. I then realize that I would have wasted lots of time and sometimes even try to procrastinate the work that I currently do.
I have a few of my friends comfortably listing to songs when they do other works. If it is an activity related to the subconscious mind, I'm okay with that but if the activity is related to the active part of the brain, then I think it is hard to focus on both. When I say subconscious mind activities, driving can be taken as a good example. When we are listening to songs while driving, it shouldn't have any greater impact because some way driving is programmed in our subconscious mind and it is not very hard to lose focus while listening to songs and driving.
I would not say that multitasking can be a bad thing for everyone. I personally experienced that to be one of the biggest challenges for me. At the same time, I have even seen some of the friends having absolutely no problem with multitasking at all. Maybe they got used to it very well or they just made it as a routine or a practice so that it became an easy thing for them.
From what I understand by multitasking it is not possible to reduce the number of action items from our list with the help of multitasking. We might end up doing an unsatisfactory work on all the items we do concurrently. The quality of work will be highly affected when we compare it with the quality if we do things one by one in a queue. To explain it in programming terminology, I understood that my brain doesn't have a multi-threading capability unless the same part of my brain is not involved.
I have been already thinking about reducing my multitasking to a greater extent. Scheduling the work I have would be a good start for me. I have to make sure I work on only one thing at a time and not distracted by other tasks that come my way. So far, I have been jumping from one task to another without completing my previous task. If I do that, I realized that the first still stays in my mind occupying my resources when I do the second one. This reduces quality, effectiveness, and concentration on my second task. Imagine if I keep jumping from one task to another continuously. I guess I have created such kind of mess in my brain.
Scheduling my task and bringing a routine is going to be the immediate solution for this problem as of now. Even if I decide to jump from one task to another, I have to make sure that the previous task is completely out of my head before I start with my next task. By doing this, I guess I can use my time effectively and create quality things.
