Multitasking

My pal Jenny Levine (Twitter: shifted) tweeted this little quote from her Kindle:

“each time we switch tasks, it costs us about 700 milliseconds of brain power, not a lot when you do it once or twice, but over an eight-hour workday, it adds up.”

This was quoted as the “cost of multitasking”.

Source:

I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted

by Nick Bilton

Yep – it adds up for sure! If you change tasks through multitasking about one hundred times a day (that’s changing tasks about 6.25 times a hour in your waking 16 hours) you will lose about 4.4 seconds an hour and a whopping 70 seconds a day or just over a minute.

Better focus.

I wonder what we lose by taking time to choose our next step every time or planning those steps.

My arithmetic is never great but it seems like this is a tiny number? Just askin’.

Stephen