The Bankwatch

The title says it all in this McKinsey piece from earlier in the year.  While it is fashionable, expected and admired to multitask the reality is that it is counterproductive.  The piece expands into a personal strategy to focus, filter and forget.  It’s a welcome reminder for time management principles.  It underlies the thinking with a new aspect to multi-tasking that is addictive and physiological. 

This drug like effect generates company inefficiency, errors and missed opportunities.

Always-on, multitasking work environments are killing productivity, dampening creativity, and making us unhappy | McKinsey

We tend to believe that by doing several things at the same time we can better handle the information rushing toward us and get more done. What’s more, multitasking—interrupting one task with another—can sometimes be fun. Each vibration of our favorite high-tech e-mail device carries the promise of potential rewards. Checking it may provide a welcome distraction from more difficult and challenging tasks. It helps us feel, at least briefly, that we’ve accomplished something—even if only pruning our e-mail in-boxes. Unfortunately, current research indicates the opposite: multitasking unequivocally damages productivity.