The Dangers of Multitasking

Travis Bradberry, author of the bestselling book Emotional Intelligence 2.0, has a great post over at the Forbes website about multitasking.  Bradberry reviews the research on multitasking and concludes that it can very detrimental.   He notes that Stanford's Clifford Nass, Eyal Ophir, and Anthony Wagner conducted research showing that, "Multitasking is less productive than doing a single thing at a time."  Moreover, the notion that some people are simply great at multitasking appears to be false.  Bradberry explains, "They found that heavy multitaskers—those who multitask a lot and feel that it boosts their performance—were actually worse at multitasking than those who like to do a single thing at a time."  The article also cites recent research showing differences in the brain for those people who engage in a great deal of multitasking.   Bradberry suggests that those changes in the brain may even reduce an individual's emotional intelligence.   That last point is purely speculation, but the overall point is clear:  multitasking may be having an adverse effect on employee performance in many organizations.