Multitasking: the ability to do several things at once
Are you good at doing two things at once? Cooking and talking on the phone, watching TV and playing mobile, exercising and listening to music ... do you feel identified with any of these situations? What are you doing right now? Do you read only the article or are you doing something else like listening to music, answering WhatsApp or looking at the mail?
Being in several things at once: multitasking
The multitask It happens when we perform several tasks at the same time or change from one task to another quickly. We can come to think that doing several things at once is to optimize time, that we are taking advantage of it and that what we have in hand is coming out perfect, that we are being effective. However, science has shown that when we force our brain to be in several things at once, it is distracted and loses effectiveness.
What are the consequences of multitasking?
By forcing ourselves to be in several things at once we accustom the brain to being off center, distracted, and therefore lose effectiveness, because our brain can not be focused on two tasks, we can not read this article and have a conversation, or better said, we can not perform both tasks efficiently.
Multitasking affects us all
It affects all those children and adolescents who have been born immersed in new technologies and who are known as "digital natives". If we look at the educational context with the introduction of ICT, we see how children can search for information, communicate with colleagues, ask questions to teachers, download files at the moment and all this quickly, one window behind the other. But this has its cost, performing several tasks at once affects school performance, concentration, and efficiency by leaving things half done.
It affects families, those mothers who lack hours in the day to finish all they have to do, combine work and family life is a challenge and ends up causing large doses of stress, anxiety and frustration for not being able to reach finish everything planned.
It affects the workers, the companies when hiring, they no longer focus so much on an expert profile, but they look for people who are capable of adapting to changes, who know how to do different tasks within the company and who are flexible This leads us to have an overload of work that affects our memory to remember everything, which creates more stress and consequently makes us less productive.
In short, multitasking forces the mind to change targets quickly, this is stressful for the brain and waste a lot of energy, exhausting us is constantly connecting and disconnecting.
What can we do to avoid falling into multitasking?
A study at Harvard University has shown that we are happier when our actions and our thoughts coincide, this is what is called living the present.
The multitask It leads us to have many moments of distraction, so if we want to be less distracted and be more effective in what we do, we must create moments in which we are in body and mind dedicated to the task at hand. In psychology it is known as "flow".
1. Set yourself a clear goal, that is not easy for you because you will get bored or very difficult because you will stress. Eg walk 20 minutes a day.
2. When you do it, concentrate on just that activity, Ex. When you focus on the sensations you feel, the sun on your skin, the contact of your feet with the ground, the rhythm of your heart * and when other thoughts come to you, simply leave them and return your attention to the task .
3. Move this to other areas of your life, to your family, to your work, etc.
Rocío Navarro Psychologist Director of Psicolari, integral psychology
