The Myth of Multitasking: Why Fewer Priorities Leads to Better Work, by James Clear
Rich Hua stashed this in Productivity
Stashed in: Words!, Focus!, Productivity, Awesome, Email, Multitasking, @james_clear
The word priority didn’t always mean what it does today.
In his best-selling book, Essentialism (audiobook), Greg McKeown explains the surprising history of the word and how its meaning has shifted over time.
The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years.
Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality. Somehow we would now be able to have multiple “first” things.
People and companies routinely try to do just that. One leader told me of this experience in a company that talked of “Pri-1, Pri-2, Pri-3, Pri-4, and Pri-5.” This gave the impression of many things being the priority but actually meant nothing was.
–Greg McKeown, Essentialism
The Myth of Multitasking:
Yes, we are capable of doing two things at the same time. It is possible, for example, to watch TV while cooking dinner or to answer an email while talking on the phone.
What is impossible, however, is concentrating on two tasks at once. Multitasking forces your brain to switch back and forth very quickly from one task to another.
This wouldn’t be a big deal if the human brain could transition seamlessly from one job to the next, but it can’t. Multitasking forces you to pay a mental price each time you interrupt one task and jump to another. In psychology terms, this mental price is called the switching cost.
Switching cost is the disruption in performance that we experience when we switch our attention from one task to another. A 2003 study published in the International Journal of Information Management found that the typical person checks email once every five minutes and that, on average, it takes 64 seconds to resume the previous task after checking your email.
In other words, because of email alone we typically waste one out of every six minutes.
Yikes!
True, but reading anything not worth reading is a waste of time... most of the emails I receive are in that category.
Except for daily PandaWhale, of course.
Or you can skip the daily email and just go here: http://pandawhale.com/pandawhale/awesome
Agreed that most emails are not worth the time.
9:03 AM Feb 28 2015