Multitasking good or bad?

Recently I wrote about time and stress management, this is the continuation of the same thoughts.

I first started multitasking at high school when the classes were way too slow for me. This was specially true of the Maths classes. I loved maths and was in the best stream (in England where the maths at high school is at a much higher level than the USA). Even so teachers have to teach for the average students and the slowest cannot keep up. This becomes worse all the time as most study is layered and if you don’t fully understand the first part it becomes very difficult if not impossible to learn the next parts.

The fastest learners have the challenge of being bored. I overcame this challenge by talking to the person next to me. I learned to multitask. Unfortunately the person next to me could not keep up talking and learning advanced calculus. In the two years we took “A Level” maths the person next to me the first year was demoted to the middle stream and the person promoted instead failed his A levels (British exam needed to enter university).

I on the other hand had managed to make my brain inefficient enough to learn without going to sleep. I’m not writing this to boast. I believe stating the truth is a form of humility. I was brilliant in maths and my spelling is atrocious. I was OK at rugby and could not hit a cricket ball if my life depended on it. We all have some talents and some fields that we are not so good at.

I only mentioned the above story to show that even then I should have understood that multitasking reduces brain power by a huge amount.

Today we multitask all the time, specially with intelligent mobile phones. Texting reduces your driving skills as though you were totally drunk and just talking on the phone while driving increases your chance of accident as though you were just over the alcohol limit in California.

So if you want to have all your brain power concentrate and do one thing at a time. Take fifteen minutes and do one things and then take next fifteen and do something else. However when you are doing things which need brain power and you multitask you reduce your efficiency by a huge amount.

When attempting tasks which need a huge amount of brain power you may wish to do some self hypnosis or meditation to increase your power of concentration. This is the opposite to multitasking.

Some multitasking may be OK. I often talk to friends while going on walks. That is because walking does not take too much of brain power for now.

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