At the end of a typical work day, do you find yourself doing a lot, accomplishing little (or not as much as you would have liked!) and yet feeling utterly exhausted? It’s midweek and yet you are counting the days till the weekend arrives. Chances are that you must have been multitasking like most of the busy girl bosses, female entrepreneurs, students, busy working from home moms!

There is just so much to do and yet not enough time! As a result, one thing you find people doing often is multitasking.

What Does Multitasking Look Like in a Busy Woman’s Life!

Look at your desk! There would be memos, books, files, bills to pay and file, and the ubiquitous empty cups of coffee (unless you happen to be a neat freak toeing the lines of OCD!) Now, let’s move to your computer. If you happen to be a multitasker, chances are that there would be multiple tabs open in your browser and lots of sub folders in your main folders, lots of sites added to the ‘favorites’ icon in your browser. Similarly, in your social media feeds, you would have ‘liked’ and ‘followed’ many pages and people.

Why Do People Multitask

Ours is a work culture that revers people who are able to get a lot done quickly. Workers and students who might be more focused on quality than quantity are not valued. As a result of these faulty expectations, people start multitasking as a response.

During your work time, you would be switching gears between work and personal chores, following your social media feeds, checking and re-checking your emails and responding to them. We all have a lot to do on day-to-basis, lots of commitments, roles to play, hats to wear and expectations to fulfill. And we try to do our best in terms of making the most in terms of fulfilling all these roles and demands.

That’s why we end up multitasking. For most parts, we end up getting a lot done, meeting most of the expectations associated with us. Multitasking makes us feel in control, on top of things and efficiently. But is it really all that!

What Multitasking Actually Does

When we are multitasking, we are getting a lot done! But this is a faux sense of control! By the end of the day, we end up feeling exhausted. And after a while, things end up getting messy and chaotic. We end up falling behind deadlines and making mistakes. Multitasking starts hurting our productivity. It doesn’t help us do quality work and merely helps us get the tasks done. So, multitasking won’t help in situations where we are required to do deeper, intuitive, original and our best work! So what is needed instead?

Mindfulness  VS. Multitasking

If you want to be good nay the best at what you do, you need to go deep and get engaged in your work through mindfulness. You have to resist the urge to squeeze in a lot of tasks in an hour, a day or a week and learn to approach work through the approach of mindfulness. This means prioritizing, organizing, categorizing, systemizing, synthesizing, and strategizing your work and personal life.

Take a project and execute tasks one by one. Just focus all your attention and energies on that oe task before moving on to the other. You would discover that you may end up doing lesser things at a time and yet:

• You would have more clarity about how to go about things.
• You would have more focus and precision.
• You would be able to minimize errors and re-doing things.
• Your completion time would improve significantly.
• At the end of the day, you won’t feel exhausted.
• You would more accomplished, fulfilled and less drained out!

How does these outcome sound?

To Sum Up

You would realize that multitasking doesn’t work  long term; it has shallow gains. Ultimately, it’s the deep, intuitive thought and work process, mindfulness towards work and life that helps us do our best work.