Multitasking: a timesaver?

The term ”multi-tasking” can be translated to a person who is able to do several actions simultaneously over a short period of time. Today this is a common phenomenon among most people. Especially the youth who are for example checking up on social media, watching TV, doing homework and eating all at the same time. Multitasking can have both advantages and disadvantages. Furthermore, I’m going to explain the negative sides of this topic.

My first argument is that multitasking isn’t going to save time. Doing several things and switching rapidly between actions gets less stuff done and lowers your productivity. It’s shown that doing multiple tasks at once has no beneficial effect on your work. This is mainly because more parts of the brain get stimulated at once which causes you to forget much of the information you take in or lower the quality of your work.

Furthermore, multitasking can cause you to loose your ability to focus. When a person constantly is swapping activities, he or she can get very prone to getting interrupted by any small distraction. By multitasking a lot, you can actually loose your ability to focus on one thing. You simply aren´t able to ignore any new information and take in all you can, subconsciously. Not being able to have a single focus on one particular task is a common issue especially among youth. This could be all due to multitasking.

Lastly I’m going to mention the stress level. When you’re constantly taking in information from all perspectives and multimedia, your brain can simply become overwhelmed. A person can only handle a certain amount of new info at once. If you are used to multitask everyday you can probably notice that you feel stressed and not satisfied with what you have achieved.

Image link

Multitasking is not a phenomenon we should depend on. Overworking the brain is simply like watering out your work. It will cause all the information to merge together and you’re most likely going to forget at least half of the new information. To conclude, multitasking is not a timesaver.

-Eivor