Multitasking involves performing more than one task at the same time. Most businessmen claim that time is like a pie, and after all, you can slice it up into many pieces as you wish. They forget that the pie sliced into lots of pieces turns into a mushy mess.

The email notifications are popping, your internet browser has more than one tab open, and there are more than five documents open on your laptop. You probably think you are becoming efficient! Below are research facts on the multitasking effect on your business.

It makes you less productive

Trying to multitask makes you take more time getting things into place. You are interrupted, which means that you will keep switching your attention back and forth during the whole day on your business premises. According to John Medina, Brain Rules, multitasking will make you spend 50% longer to accomplish the task.

With time you will realize that you weren’t really multitasking rather than switching your tasks more often. Research shows that multitasking reduces your productivity by 40%. You can use tile window multitasking in macOS if you are working on lots of tasks simultaneously. Mosaic offers a great way to re-arrange multiple apps open on Mac without moving and resizing them manually.

Hides tools working against you

Business tools do not solely operate independently, as many people who multitask would wish to have them working. They depend more on the instructions that you feed them with to carry out different available tasks.

You may think that you are getting “productive” when using these tools, but unfortunately, the tools are working against you. It’s normal to feel exhausted after multitasking, but that shouldn’t be an excuse that you have worked so hard during the day.

That’s typically a fake success as it hides the fact that the tools weren’t as effective as they should. Imagine picking up a tool and using it a bit and then picking another different tool, and the process repeats itself for the whole day!

It lowers the quality of output

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, multitasking reduces your work performance and makes most of the projects go on longer than usual. It also induces panic at the final product manufacturing stages simply because things are not adding up as you expected.

This will negatively affect the quality of the product as you just rushed through different stages to get the final product fast. The products will lose value in the market, and their prices are likely to go down drastically, leading to huge losses.

Never at any point think that you are doing an excellent job because you are tackling more than one task simultaneously. The truth is that you are just creating an ugly picture for your products in front of the target customers.

Reduced business connections

Multitasking will reduce the ability of your business to make connections with established firms and target customers. That’s because you focus on more things than you can handle and leave most of them to slip past your hands.

It reduces your ability to remember things effectively, which is a dangerous trait, especially when analyzing the market structure of your business. To cater to your target customers effectively, you need to remember almost all your customers and respond to their rising claims about the services offered.

Studies have shown that multitasking makes it impossible to learn new market strategies effectively and hence wasting a lot of business resources on fake product promotion campaigns. Researching while working on a different design will make things hard for you. It will drain your ability to grasp different contents that are available.

You are prone to cheating

It’s an unethical business practice to lie about the products or services that you are offering. Multitasking makes you prone to making a lot of mistakes that may be interpreted as cheating unintentionally. And that’s due to the sloppy mistakes that were very evident, but you were too busy handling other tasks in the name of “time is money.”

According to Weinschenk, switching from one task to the other makes you more prone to making mistakes. If you realize later that the tasks were complex at the initial stages, you may feel just like roughly completing them to be at least “safe.” It will make you cut through different corners to complete the tasks, which may be interpreted as dishonest and being doped as a business crook.

Conclusion

Multitasking is indeed not the best way to approach tasks in a business environment. You can decide to hire more employees to complete the different tasks cropping up than doing a messy business that will waste your time. In the end, the results may turn out to be devastating as you may lose the whole business.