Multitasking has become a buzz word in today’s world. It used to be “He who has the most toys before he dies wins.” Now I wonder if it is “She who juggles the most tasks wins.” There is no doubt that we are expected by society, our jobs, peers, and families to do many things well in the same 24 hours that we have always had. The expectation of society is big problem in a lot of areas, but who is “society?” Isn’t that us, you and me?

The term “multitasking” originated in the computer world. It simply means that computers are able to do many tasks at the same time. However, even that is not really true. It is just that computers can flip back and forth between tasks very rapidly. So can we, but at what cost? There has been a lot of research on this multitasking thing recently. It turns out that we are shortchanging ourselves in many ways when we attempt to multitask. If our reason for multitasking is that we want to save time, we might want to rethink that. Research is pointing to the fact that we really can’t put out attention on more than one thing at a time, but, like the computer, we can flip from one thing to another rapidly. The cost, however, is that, unlike the computer, our brains need to have time to refocus on each task each time we turn to it. This refocusing time, actually costs us time in the long run. We may feel like we are getting more done, but the time wasted on refocusing really adds up in the course of a day. Not only does it take longer to complete tasks, but research is also saying that the results we get on all of our tasks are not nearly as good as they would be if we had focused on each of them exclusively.