Multi-tasking has been a buzzword for the last couple of decades. People boast about their ability to manage the constant stream of emails, telecons, cross town meetings, picking up kids, report writing, deal closing, grocery shopping and more.
Yet modern life is often chaotic and stressful, and burnout is not uncommon. In fact, a Regus Group survey of 22 000 business people across 100 countries reported that 53% of the global workforce is closer to burnout than they were five years ago.
Part of the reason for this, according to an article published by Rich Fernandez in the Harvard Business Review, titled Help your Team Manage Stress, Anxiety, and Burnout, is that the benefits of multi-tasking are a myth. People are not especially efficient parallel processors – computers beat us hands down in that field.
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How Multi-tasking robs your time
Neuroscientist and educational researcher JoAnn Deak reports that multi-tasking traditionally ‘doubles the amount of time it takes to do a task, and it usually doubles the amount of mistakes’. Her research indicates that people are actually best at ‘serial mono-tasking’ — setting aside time for prioritisation of a specific deliverable, and avoiding overlapping tasks and assignments. Basically, do one thing at a time. Properly.
Dedicating time to a single task
Sales executives can help their teams to remain productive and engaged by implementing the mono-tasking principle through ‘time-blocking’. Put processes in place that allow your team to focus on one-thing-at-a-time. This will improve the productivity of your team, save time and help them manage their stress. And as we all know, a happy workforce is a resilient and productive asset.
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The extra time saved will also allow you to purposefully create the time for your staff to take some ‘gap time’ during the work day. According to Linda Stone, former head of Microsoft University, there is a tendency for people to be a live node at work, an ‘always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behaviour’ that results in a suboptimal and dissatisfying state of ‘continuous partial attention’.
Creating space for 100% focus on one deliverable at a time will result in better performance and more satisfied employees.
