Multitasking is Killing Your Productivity! Have a Drink Instead! 🥃

We all know that multi-tasking is bad, yet we do it anyway. 🤯🤯🤯 Incoming requests from different stakeholders, deadlines to deliver towards or the simple yearning from our brains for engagement - this online meeting just isn’t where we need to be right now, time to 'listen in' whilst doing something else. We can infer from Little’s Law that the more we are doing at any given time (on average) the longer each one of those things will take to get done (on average). That’s because we’re not actually multitasking, the term ‘multitasking’ was coined in the 60’s and was attributed to a computer’s ability to process several tasks concurrently. Unfortunately our 40,000 year old brains are not so capable, we are simply task-switching from one thing to another, causing our brains to exude additional and unnecessary cognitive energy. Not only is this the single biggest killer of our productivity because it slows us down, we're also far more error prone when juggling things around in our minds. According to recent stats, approximately 20% of car accidents are now due to a distracted driver. Another study states that people who text whilst driving react 23% slower than intoxicated drivers do! So next time you’re at your desk and thinking about multitasking whilst on that zoom call... consider a glass of scotch instead! 🥃