Multitasking: The Illusion of Efficiency

We're all familiar with juggling different things throughout the day. Many of the posts that I have written recently have dealt with maintaining your schedule and organizing your life. One of the things that I feel strongly about is multitasking and how it is affecting our lives.

Many of us multitask everyday, but how much are we actually able to do before we reach our limit. I'm sure that we've all had the experiences when we've been talking to someone while writing and start typing what we were saying. For things such as this it is easy to understand why this happens, but we need to understand that it pervades our lives.

One of the ways to see this is by using Moore's law as a benchmark. Moore's law states that approximately every 18 months computing efficiency will double. This was true for many decades, but recently computing power has taken another turn. Engineers have just about made components just as small as they can get. In other words, in order to increase computing speed we have to find a way to combine processor cores to work on the same problems. If you look at your computer now, you might have up to four core-processors built-in. This allows your computer to work on multiple problems at the same time and greatly enhances processing speed.

The problem is, you can't just link different brains to your brain. At some point, the inertia of your thoughts overwhelms your ability to keep things straight. It's not that we aren't able to do multiple things at the same time, but the ability of doing those things deteriorates as more things are added. It's complexity that disallows us from doing so many things and jumping from item to item doesn't help. We all know what happens when you jump from screen to screen on your computer when you have so many things running. Eventually, you're going to crash.

To conclude, it is better to do one thing right and get it done and progress to the next task. If you try to pull yourself in too many directions, your work will only get worse. Do yourself a favor and focus on one thing at a time. Realizing limitations can be a hard thing to do, but the benefits of being realistic can improve performance.