Too busy to read?

Although we think we're doing several things at once, multitasking, this has been shown to be a powerful and diabolical illusion. Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT and one of the world experts on divided attention, says that our brains are "not wired to multi-task well. ... When people think they're multi-tasking, they're actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there's a cognitive cost in doing so."

Every time you switch the focus of your Attention from one subject to another, you incur the Cognitive Switching Penalty. In order to take action, your brain has to "load" the context of what you're doing into working memory. If you constantly switch the focus of your Attention, you're forcing your brain to spend time and effort thrashing, loading and reloading contexts over and over again.

we can easily do two things at the same time: wash the dishes and listen to the radio, eat and talk, clear the clutter on our desk while thinking about where to go for lunch, text message while watching television, and so on. What we can't do is concentrate on two things at the same time. When I talk about

In multitasking, we unknowingly enter an addiction loop as the brain's novelty centers become rewarded for processing shiny new stimuli, to the detriment of our prefrontal cortex, which wants to stay on task and gain the rewards of sustained effort and attention. We need to train ourselves to go for the long reward, and forgo the short one. Don't forget that the awareness of an unread e-mail sitting in your inbox can effectively reduce your IQ by 10 points,

Multitasking is the enemy of a focused attentional system. Increasingly, we demand that our attentional system try to focus on several things at once, something that it was not evolved to do.

To avoid unproductive context switching, a batching strategy is best. Eliminating distractions can help prevent unnecessary interruptions, but it's entirely possible to waste energy mentally thrashing even if you have the entire day free. The best approach to avoid unnecessary cognitive switching is to group similar tasks together.

To do two things at once is to do neither.

Multitasking is a good way to screw up progress,

At a basic level, many brain studies have shown that the idea of multitasking is a myth. When we shift our focus from one input to another, we exert more energy and use more time to finish everything than if we would have completed one task before starting another.

The upshot of Little's Law is that, in general, the more things that you work on at any given time (on average) the longer it is going to take for each of those things to finish (on average).

Multitasking is merely the opportunity to screw up more than one thing at a time. --Steve Uzzell