multitasking

Edward(Wang Yunzhi) wrote:

Jessica_Ren(Yan Jin Ren) wrote:From my point of view, multitask are not efficient and effective because we can not fully concentrate on more than one task at the same time and it may cause us to make more errors. Dealing with multiple things will also make us drained and feel a lot of pressure. On the other hand, it will be dangerous in some situation with multitasking. For example, when you are driving, if you not focus on the road, you may lose your life.
So if we want to improve the quality of our work, feel less stress, become more efficient and have more energy at the end of the day, we should make good schedule and not multitask.

Actually, i am quite agree with you.
Now adays, it is more and more difficult for a person to focus on one task, the reason is that there are too many information that disturb us to focus on. My suggestion for out daily work is that, at the beginning of our job, we should make a plan first, try to rank them by importance and do them one by one, try to concentrate on one task at one time.

From my point,I strongly suggest one mission at one time ,for men's energy is limited.

I used to consider myself adept at multi-tasking and naively feel proud of my brightness. Not until I learned from CBI class that multi-tasking may kill our performances and damage our brains did I realize how stupid I was: Since multi-tasking, rather than a strength as I perceived, is in fact a weakness.

No one can be really good at multi-tasking since human brains are simply not born to handle multitask. If we force our brains to tackle different tasks simultaneously, we put our brains in pressure and the likelihood of errors is going to increases since our brains receive distractions beyond their enduring capacities. Consequently, we even need to spend more time and energy revising the errors made in processing multitasks, bringing negative impact on our performances. I suppose that’s why I often become irritable after handling multitasks.

It’s the time for me to stay in focus and cast myself away from too many external distractions. Just concentrate on a single task and switch to the next only when the previous is finished. It is the only smart way to boost performance and efficiency.

A lot of research said that our brains only be developed around 10%. If rest 90% can be utilized, can we do multitask?

If we look brain as CPU, can brain be upgrade like CPU?

Before coming to this class and reading this passage, I always believe that i'm capable of multitasking. Actually, the essence is switching fast but it exhausted my brain after the testing. Therefore, I would like to focus or pay attention to one thing at one time to improve the efficiency and result.

Before professor class, I never notice the damage multitasking made. Im always multitasking no matter willing or not. Always interrupted by phone call,email. after the class, I tried to focus and do not immediately reply mot urgent emails. It helps a lot. but many things happened not as plan. we are interrupted all the time. so we need learn to say no to some request and set priority. its just time management + concentration

i think multikasking is the lack of focus on inefficient behavior too, seemingly simultaneously more than one thing, the real damage is inevitable outcome of all things. Mechanically synchronized and can not bring the results established, it may not be efficient use of time. It is important to think and act quickly to enter the "state" in order to truly achieve fast switching state. It needs to have its own logical thinking to start a route map, and more scientific thinking system also requires a long period of practical training and effort. Daily life, some people do things particularly efficient, especially considering things quickly, but also good planning to arrange their own time, so at the same time, they can do a lot more things than others.

I could not agree more that multitasking damages my work, but how about multitasking in Relationship?  I always focused on one man if I like him. But my parents and friends suggest: why don't you date with different men, that would be more efficient. You may have more choices." Now I am confused...      
In addition, we have just studied the word BANTN in the course Business Communications last week.  BATNA means Best Alternative To a Negotiation Agreement. If you have BATNA, you will be more confidente and successful in negotiation. You know if you always focus on one man, he would feel breathless and then he want to run away....So maybe multitasking in Relationship would be a good idea...

Research shows that multitasking lowers people’s IQ and I have no doubt for that. The increasingly-fast pacing society has put us under a lot of pressure that many of us get challenged by various matters every single day. Especially in the Monday morning, tens of emails waiting in the box to be replied, a dozen missed call blinking in the desk phone and probably your boss are waiting in the meeting room for your presentation. We all get overwhelmed by huge work load and I am pretty sure that’s inevitable.
The way I used to do is through multi-tasking, answering the phone while replying the email with short response, talking to people while leaving a message for someone else I am supposed to meet. Day by day, it feels exhausting and the work quality is no way to be guaranteed. What’s worse, probably I've already got a PHD – permanent head damage.
I have no answer to this question but keep telling myself one at a time or at least lower the 'multi-tasking' percentage, if someone didn't come to my desk to argue, he surely can wait longer. To delegate my work to my team members or plan the work a bit earlier can also help.
I am still learning from doing, and hope I can fix this in a more efficient and skilled way.

Sunday playing with my young boy, i noticed the child think straightly and attentively, although his thought is too simple and too naive, sometimes he might say a significant sentence which made me supprised and ashamed. Child is always singletasking but more creative than adult.

Maybe we can use it as a weapon if we hate someone or want to damage someone's brain.

For example, we may use multitasking experiment to the criminals who 's mind is very clever and have used their idea to commit crimes.
They'll go on committing crimes if we dont have good way to interrupt them, then one good suggestion is :

Make them love to use multitasking and damage their brain, so they cannot have so creative idea to commit crimes.This can be used by the police officer and the scientist who help police officer train the criminals.

郭晶瑾 wrote:Maybe we can use it as a weapon if we hate someone or want to damage someone's brain.

For example, we may use multitasking experiment to the criminals who 's mind is very clever and have used their idea to commit crimes.
They'll go on committing crimes if we dont have good way to interrupt them, then one good suggestion is :

Make them love to use multitasking and damage their brain, so they cannot have so creative idea to commit crimes.This can be used by the police officer and the scientist who help police officer train the criminals.

hahaha, good idea!

Strategy is always about focus and choosing not to do something. It is same in our life, career and business. Multitasking will make you lose focus. Purely focusing and persisting in a few things will out-stand you.

Doing more than one task at a time, especially more than one complex task, takes a toll on productivity. Although that shouldn't surprise anyone who has talked on the phone while checking E-mail or talked on a cell phone while driving, the extent of the problem might come as a shock. Psychologists who study what happens to cognition (mental processes) when people try to perform more than one task at a time have found that the mind and brain were not designed for heavy-duty multitasking. Psychologists tend to liken the job to choreography or air-traffic control, noting that in these operations, as in others, mental overload can result in catastrophe.

just have read one news on weibo saying that, a girl have tried to text back her mother when she is driving. it ends up with a tragic accident. She lost her eyes and 1 leg. I guess this is the case what Chelsea mentioned "in others, mental overload can result in catastrophe."

Rachel Han wrote:just have read one news on weibo saying that, a girl have tried to text back her mother when she is driving. it ends up with a tragic accident. She lost her eyes and 1 leg.    I guess this is the case what Chelsea mentioned "in others, mental overload can result in catastrophe."

Indeed, multitasking may put you under a very dangerous situation. Professor always mentioned that one thing at a time. People cannot do multitask at the same time. The only thing we can do is switching. Some people switch fast, others slower, but no multitasking is there. Trying to manage both tasks at the same time will lead nothing to be achieved.

I am a person prone to multitasking. I think this is also the life style even work style of many contemporary young people who are easliy distracted by the devices around us. I lack the awareness until read this research showing that multitasking damages our brain and career. I think this is really helpful to build my awareness and keep me concentrate on one thing at a time. I have the same experience with what mentioned in the passage that always writing an email during a meeting. When doing so, I couldn't listen well what people are talking; likewise, the voice made me difficult to think about and write an email quickly. Now I know this is because my brain was switching back and forth from listening to thinking about, the activity of brain made me difficult to deeply focus on one thing. I really appreciate this course to bring me the cognition to our brain. I think I can change myself from now on to keep me concentrate well on one thing at a time. Doing one thing at a time is the most productive and efficient rather than multitasking what we thought it could save our time. I think this is also helpful for me to educate my kid helping him build a good habit.

XU Xiaoling wrote:I am a person prone to multitasking. I think this is also the life style even work style of many contemporary young people who are easliy distracted by the devices around us. I lack the awareness until read this research showing that multitasking damages our brain and career. I think this is really helpful to build my awareness and keep me concentrate on one thing at a time. I have the same experience with what mentioned in the passage that always writing an email during a meeting. When doing so, I couldn't listen well what people are talking; likewise, the voice made me difficult to think about and write an email quickly. Now I know this is because my brain was switching back and forth from listening to thinking about, the activity of brain made me difficult to deeply focus on one thing. I really appreciate this course to bring me the cognition to our brain. I think I can change myself from now on to keep me concentrate well on one thing at a time. Doing one thing at a time is the most productive and efficient rather than multitasking what we thought it could save our time. I think this is also helpful for me to educate my kid helping him build a good habit.

Fully agree with you. I also usually compose an email during the meeting. And I could not manage any activities either. I intend to do so because I feel like it could save time. However, now I realized that multitasking is not to save time but waste time to some extent. We can locate all the tasks to the four quadrants formed by two axis -- Urgency and Impact and focus on one thing at a time.

I think general speaking this new research may correct. I also saw many students combine to draw their own work experience made the conclusion that multitasking will damage our attention especially for our brain. Sometimes we want to deal with the issue but greatly reducing the productivity of our task.
But I believe this reaserch is only for the average number of large crowds and also there is a premise: that you deal with things is more important and urgent.
When the task with higher repetitive and not so important then it seems that many people to multi task in the way of dealing with the matter. Such as we turned on the TV to listen to the news while wash our face in the morning. Within our life some people have a special multi task ability or talent . They can quickly and accurately make a determination when deal with other affairs at the same time, and that the decisions are always right. But of course, this is just individual person. So we didn’t need focus on the “demand our brain for the matter of multi task processing. But we need identify the segment of our task if it could be deal with multitask in order to decide not to be late.

I believe that the new studies suggest about multitasking damages brain are true, from my point of view, because of the work requirement, I’m multitasking every day, It seems that my work efficiency is high, in reality, I’ve affected by multitasking, I cannot get a thorough through with the task, although my work experience improved, my work efficiency was not ideal.
I think the study that every time you multitask you aren’t just harming your performance in the moment; you may very well be damaging an area of your brain that’s critical to your future success at work.
But multitasking is unavoidable, to us, The only thing to do is form the habit of reducing multitasking as many as possible.

From my point of view, multi-tasking is not an efficient way of working. Once we thought about doing two things or more at one time, we cannot focus on anyone and thus restrict our potential. People should always pay attention on anything he is doing, and that's what we called "live in the moment".

For this topic, I fully agrees the article's opinion that multitasking will be not only harming to my performance and also damage to my brain. Generally speaking, normally we have misunderstanding about high productivity and multitasking. We think high efficiency means that we could do several things in paralell for time saving. In fact it's multitasking.I have such experience often time,esp. in meeting, which will lead to low self & social awareness. After CBI class, I changed my working way.Every morning, I write my daily agenda for the most important tasks and then I will concentrate them one by one, even if I'm interruptted in the course, I will still go back to continue it. The obvious effect , I think , is that the quality of working has been improved a lot. And I do feel mental & physical enjoyment after tasks completed one and another...
Passing the anxiety, avoiding boring, focusing&immersed, you will be in flow. It's the best mental status that bring you happiness...

Before reading this article, I used to writing emails during the meeting. Besides that, I am often self-righteous for that I could make the best of time. At present, I just know, it is so unwise to multitask. It not only reduced the efficiency of work because of lack of necessary concentration and deep thinking, but also could destroy the brain and reduce IQ as high multitaskers had make negetive effect for brains to control emotions.
No wonder,when I was doing other working during the meeting, it was usually found that I was missing something or could not really receive the messages in the meeting.
So, it is necessary to change the habit of multitasking and should fouce one thing until it is done.

Wu Shujun(Helena Wu) wrote:We know the potential damage to our brain if we carry our jobs in multi-tasking type, but the problem is whether we can easily avoid multi-taking.  When we were a kind, our parent forced us to concentrate only one task especially when we were studying. So with pressure from our parents, it will be much easier for us to avoid multi-tasking. But when we grew up, we have to act as different roles, we will feel pressure from our work and life. Then it is not strange for you to find parents talk on the phone with friend, check email from mobile phone or read article using their mobile when they stay with their kids. This is just one simple example from our daily life. From our daily jobs, we can find even worse situation. I once suffered problem of multi-tasking, which makes me nervous, lower my happiness. So I took action to focus on one task every time and define all the jobs according to difficulty level and urgency level to complete them one by one. I really improve my working efficiency from then.    

In fact, I was totally agreed with you.
Even we clearly kown that it is not effective for multitasking, we would not overcome that habits, as the fasting pace of work or the different roles we act during the life.
So, we could pay more attetion to define the jobs depending on the level of difficult  or urgency so that we could make best use of time to finish them step-by-step.
Besides that, we could make the difficult works which need a clear-head to be finished in the morning or the period which would not be interrupted. Meanwhile, those easy taskes could be completed during the sacttered time period.

Multi-tasking has made me grow dull and stupid

Maybe I was multitasking, ever at the ready to add another task to the schedules. For some reasons I couldn't stop and keep adding more pressure to the work. The irony was that the more I did this, the farther I actually ended up from the original goals. At the same time, I always felt "so much to do, but so little done".

In this article, new studies show that multitasking kills our performance and may even damage our brain. I knew the real reason why I was inefficient finally.

It will take a minimum of 21 days to ensure behavior change. So, I will stop right now and learn to focus on a task at a time, much like building a house where we lay brick upon brick.