Yes, I’m Addicted to Multitasking

The pace of life has been faster ever since I started to live alone. I juggled between school and part-time jobs in a new country, far away from home and my dear ones. I kept journals, agendas, and sticky notes to list out all the tasks to do: complete assignments, coursework deadlines, test dates, and even household chores and errands like doing the dishes, folding the laundry, meal prepping for the week, grocery shopping, etc. I was made fun of by my friends, but I knew I needed those to-do lists to remember things, as I worked 2 jobs (when most of my friends did only one), and the fact that I’m quite absent minded.

That’s when I developed a new habit to juggle around with things. I constantly started to do two or more activities at the same time; I would watch an episode of my favourite drama series while eating food, listen to podcasts or music while cooking, read books while travelling to and from work, etc. Within a few months, these habits unconsciously became a daily part of my existence. If I was only doing one thing at a time, I felt like I was wasting the precious hours. Unknowingly, I was giving in to the addiction to multitasking…

How Multitasking Affects Productivity

Though it may seem like you are getting a lot of stuff done through multitasking, what you are really doing is exhausting your brain and killing productivity! Our brains aren’t equipped to switch between various tasks at the same time.

Experts claim that multitasking is risky and inefficient.

Some of the reasons why multitasking decreases productivity:

Lack of output quality:

Multitasking focuses more on the number of things that you can do at a time. Therefore, quality is compromised over quantity. It also causes mental drain, which prompts you to abruptly end the tasks at hand.

Makes more mistakes:

Due to natural inability of the brain to concentrate on multiple tasks at the same time, multitaskers are unable to focus on what they do, and as a result, commit mistakes. While I was multitasking at my work, I was in a hurry to finish different duties at the same time, and I frequently made mistakes, which cost a lot of money.

You get distracted often:

Juggling between tasks can make you lose focus and get distracted, thereby not yielding productive outcomes. While I was in college studying for exams, I had the habit of listening to music, or watching Pomodoro study videos on YouTube. I noticed that multitasking this way while cramming for exams had a detrimental effect on my grades, as I was often distracted.

It slows you down:

While you switch tasks during multitasking, there is a “lag time” associated with the switch. Also, you lose the flow of task at hand when trying to work on another, which can prove to be time-consuming, while decreasing productive output.

It causes confusion:

You keep wasting time thinking which task to start first, how to include other tasks in between, and the chronological order in which each of them has to be executed. While switching from one task to another, you are basically terminating your thinking process on one side and starting another. This often leaves the multitasker extremely confused.

So What Made Me Addicted To Multitasking?

The best answer that I can ever come up with, is the fact that I have been forcing myself to multitask all the time, which eventually evolved into an unbreakable habit. Afterwards, I could never really focus on one thing at a time, because I constantly told myself that I am not fully utilizing the time. Thus, I was always keen in filling up the waiting time in between my work with other minor tasks.

Research shows that chronic multitasking can lead to addiction due to dopamine release. However, dopamine receptors get dulled overtime from this habit, and makes you multitask more in order to achieve the same results. The symptoms of multitasking addiction are irritability, impatience, absent-mindedness, restlessness, etc.

How To Cure This Habit?

1. Cutting out distractions from your work area.
2. Decluttering your space, and making the setting minimalistic.
3. Try to use one gadget at a time.
4. Set a timer for a single task that you are trying to complete. Convince yourself that you will only do other works after the timer ends.
5. Lastly, take a break, shut any personal devices off, and go for a stroll in nature.