According to Travis Bradberry in his article, Multitasking Damages Your Brain And Career, New Studies Suggest, “Multitasking reduces your efficiency and performance because your brain can only focus on one thing at a time. When you try to do two things at once, your brain lacks the capacity to perform both tasks successfully.” Multitasking can be categorized as something as simple as writing an email during a meeting or checking phone notifications while listening to the professor conduct their lecture. When we multitask- or, shall I say, attempt to multitask– we truly are not giving our to all of the tasks we are working to complete simultaneously. For me, this is a lesson that I learned the hard way.
During early Covid times in 2020, I was a sophomore in high school, experiencing completely asynchronous classes for the very first time, and was faced with the challenge of becoming my own teacher and completing all of my schoolwork all while doing so at my small bedroom desk. At this time, I was constantly distracted by the uproar of TikTok, trying to stay connected with my friends, and having an overload of assignments hanging over my head; my only choice was to multitask. When writing a paper, I would simultaneously be thinking about the fact that I haven’t reached out to one of my friends while also seeing my phone screen light up as I was in a full-class Zoom meeting and ultimately finding my way to a social media platform. I quickly realized that if in-person school was not in my near future, I needed to find a way to have fewer mental and physical distractions, as these distractions ultimately caused me to start new tasks while still working on the previous five tasks that I somehow began all multitasking. With this, I discovered that intentional, timed mental breaks and listening to soothing study music while completing assignments have helped me tremendously to break my habits of distraction and multitasking.
By allowing myself (quite frequent) breaks when the feelings of distraction approach me without having feelings of guilt for not staying on task, I ultimately am helping myself to be more productive and focused when I actually am working. Along with this, when I am working, I find that I am most successful when I use my noise-canceling headphones as I listen to Lofi Girl Study music. These two rituals, when used in conjunction with one another, help me significantly to “lock in” to the task at hand and aid in decreasing my overall distractions and urges to begin multitasking.
Leave a Reply