Stress Management - How Multi-Tasking can Decrease Effectiveness by 44% and Increase Your Stress

You've seen her - she's driving down the route and putting on her constitution at the same time. When I was in alumnus school I used to read on the manner to social class - driving down the interstate at 65 statute miles per hour. What was really chilling was when I mentioned my wont to some chap pupils 1 twenty-four hours over coffee. Respective of them nodded their caputs and admitted they did the same thing.

I have got to confess - I am constantly tempted to seek to cram more activity into the same clip frame. I knew I had gone too far, though, when I was brushing my dentition 1 twenty-four hours and noticed the lavatory needed cleaning. I thought to myself, "Well, I have got one free manus . . ." (No, I didn't make it.)

These may be utmost examples, but it have almost go a badge of award - how many things can you make at once? In fact, some clip direction advisers actually propose you make two things at once in order to salvage clip and be more than efficient.

Recent research bespeaks this may not be your best strategy, however. Why? Because you are likely to expend more energy and accomplish less satisfactory consequences than if you focused on one activity at a time. Marcel Just, a professor at Dale Carnegie Andrew Mellon University have used functional MRI, which is like a image of the encephalon at work, to analyze what haps in a person's encephalon when they multi-task.

He asked topics to execute two highly independent undertakings that necessitate two different parts of the brain. One undertaking was linguistic communication comprehension and the other involved mentally rotating physical objects in space. Without getting too technical here, he measured how many "brain units" were activated while topics performed the two undertakings separately and then at the same time.

He establish that each undertaking individually activated 37 units, each in different areas. But when topics were asked to multi-task, rather than using 74 units of measurement of measurement (37 for each task), only 42 units were activated. This stands for only 56% of the "brain units" that were involved when the undertakings were done separately, or a 44% reduction.

What is the most likely consequence here? Decreased performance, oversights, mistakes, and inefficiency are the inevitable outcome. Not exactly what you had in head when you started to make two things at once was it?

On the asset side, additional research did bespeak that people can larn to be more than efficient at multi-tasking, but they never accomplish the degree of public presentation possible when focusing on just one thing at a time. There is an old expression that if you don't have got clip to make it right the first time, where are you going to happen the clip to make it over? Where in your life can you afford a 44% decrease in effectiveness? I thought so. Focus on one thing at a clip and cut down your stress.