How would you rate yourself as a multi-tasker? On a scale of 0-10, with 10 being able to easily do a number of things at once, where do you score?
What’s really happening during multitasking? What is our brain really doing?
Well according to Daniel Levitin, neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, multitasking is a diabolical illusion that many of us, including me, thought is possible. Even when you think you’re doing more than one thing at once, it’s simply not true. According to Earl Miller, neuroscientist at MIT and a world expert on divided attention, our brains are “not wired to multitask well… When people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly.” Every time we switch, it costs us.
When we think we’re doing several things at once, we’re not really doing 
everything without a cost. We are NOT keeping a lot of plates in the air like an expert juggler; we’re more like a bad amateur juggler, as we frantically switch from one task to another, seeing only the one that is right in front of us and desperately hoping that the rest won’t come crashing down.
Honestly, it’s an illusion; we think we’re getting a lot done, and in reality we are less efficient.
The risk we run when we multitask is that we may miss the little cues and hints that we would normally pick up on it a certain task was our single focus. The nuances.
As for our own well being, Levitin reminds us that multitasking increases the production of stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline, which can over activate your brain and cause fuzzy thinking.
So my challenge to you today is to take one multitasking event you usually do, and complete each of the tasks individually, one after the other. Let me know how it works.
If you are a regular multi-tasker, please share one of your experience here .