Years ago most job advertisements listed multitasking as an essential skill of qualified employees. Now more and more studies and articles suggest multitasking is a drain on employee and company resources.
Today we have more opportunity to be attached to many different tasks at once than ever before. We can take phone calls, emails, files and documents with us wherever we go. We are tempted to multitask our life away, twenty-four hours a day.
When our focus is split by multitasking, we are unable to devote ourselves to the task at hand and unable to fully enjoy life. Being present in each moment as we live it allows us to experience with all our senses, to pay attention to our needs, and proactively consider and manage our needs and the needs of our employer.
I excel in my work and am more successful at meeting my goals when I am focused on one task at a time. I can prioritize and consider which task requires my immediate attention, and focus on that task before moving on to the next task. It is enough to manage one task at a time, and in doing so I make fewer errors and spend less time making amends to customers and co-workers, and less time correcting errors.
Practicing work-life balance requires me to focus on what’s important and let go of the rest. I must attend to what is truly essential to my personal care, family care and professional goals. To be successful in my work-life balance, I must reduce the amount of unwanted and unnecessary information that will distract me from what is important to me.
Loving my work-life requires me to live a mindful existence, doing the next right thing and allowing what I can accomplish today to be enough. Loving my work-life requires that I accept myself as I am so I may make the best use of my skills and talents and ask for guidance and direction with other tasks. To do this I must pay special attention to this moment as it happens, recognizing and honoring what I can and can’t do.
We all have to multitask sometimes in our work and our lives. Practice balance and moderate multitasking so that multitasking works for you, not against you. If multitasking is splitting your focus, creating feelings of stress and causing increased errors, consider unitasking instead and experience more joy in your work-life.
For more information on the potential harms of multitasking, consider these articles:
Believe It: Multitasking Reduces Productivity…. and That’s Not All by Marlene M. Maheu, Ph.D. from SelfHelpMagazine.com
Drop that BlackBerry! Multitasking may be harmful by Theresa Tamkins from CNNHealth.com