Is multi-tasking making us more productive?

Is multi-tasking making us more productive?

Let us imagine we have entered into a Book shop. Book shop is located in a heart of the city so book shop is crowded with many customers like students, avid readers, researchers, window shoppers. Owner is the only person available in the shop to serve all of the customers. He thinks that he’s a multi-tasking person. He is showing some books to few customers, taking money from the customers who bought the books, keeping eye on window shoppers, suggesting genres and newly arrived books to few regular customers, keeping check on the current stock of the books, printing bills out of the purchases, keeping the book racks clean and tidy. He is aware about trend going in today’s environment about ‘Multi-tasking’ so he is patting his own back and praising himself.

What do we think after reading this example? “Why doesn’t he hire an assistant?”, “He could make more money by keeping few employees in a shop.” These might be obvious statements came in our mind, while reading this example. No? We are also doing the same with ourselves but not in this outside physical world but inside in our mind. Yes, shop-keeper would do more better, if he keeps an assistant or employees but he doesn’t think so. He is managing this book shop from last many years with this way and he is successful in becoming a profitable businessman. No-one can not deny his experience.

You might be thinking that I can do multi-tasking easily. I have my strategies to do. Definitely, we can do multi-tasking but now we will see what exactly happens in our mind at the time of multi-tasking. We can do two or three or more tasks together but we can not concentrate on two tasks at one point of time. So we switch ourselves from one task to another with more and more faster speed. This technique works smoothly and seamlessly upto our limits but we cross these limits without knowing ourselves. It has very thin line in between. Once we cross the limit, it takes few more seconds to focus on a task after switching ourselves from another task. It increases our performing time and we may loose few details of that task in a hurry. This results in hampering our productivity. This type of phenomenon may loose our patience level and we may become restless & anxious. This anxiety increases the time in between switching the task from one to another. It means, if we are taking 2 seconds to switch from one task to another in normal case then now we start taking 5 to 8 seconds in switching ourselves. It has cumulative effect by increasing our working time. Again it has chain reaction on hampering our performance. It may increase our tendency to have some so called relaxation like smoking limitless cigarettes or drinking glasses of beer or having some shots. Actually we are finding some relaxation in slowing the list of tasks and its switching speed.  Additionally, this habit results in addiction and hampers our health. So it is better to prioritise our tasks, understand our limits, focus on one task at time and give our best possible performance.

If you want to learn more about this in details, get in touch with us.

Email: jeevan@mindhealth.in

Making movies in our mind makes us Un-productive

We love to watch movies. Many times we have our own choices. We choose to watch a movie if its genre, music, actors, actresses and a few other ‘influencing’ factors appeal us.

Behind the camera, when a movie is made, it’s story is always based on some creative imaginations. Even in cases where movies are based on true stories, they need to be fabricated in order to make them more appealing to the audience. This ‘appealing’ factor engages us and increases our involvement in the movie. Some movies create a serious impact on our emotions for a longer period of time.

Now, there is a small secret about our mind..! We also have a habit of creating our own movies in the mind. We start making movies due to our inabilities to face realities. We become very creative when we make such movies. Subconsciously, we start becoming habitual to such kind of a phenomenon.

When we start making movies in our mind, we may pick up characters from real life or many times they may even be fictitious or imaginative (e.g.: my perfect man or my perfect partner). We usually associate different contextual references and experiences from our real life with these fictitious characters. As we start enjoying our own creation, we get habitual to it and start making more movies in our mind. Sometimes we visualise very disturbing probable results of a simple situation. It may not even be a problem. Many people pass number of hours in making such mind movies. Surprisingly, these movies may have thrill, suspense, horror, romance and comedy also. You may have seen people smiling or laughing for no reason when they drive alone on a bike. It happens with us also. We choose to become the main hero or heroin in many instances. As it is dramatic, it is very addictive in nature.

Gradually, this fun of our mind movies gets worse and detaches us from the present realities. Unknowingly, we start living either in the past or the future with the fictitious support of these fake movies. We reject the choice of living in the present. This is how we get habitual to it and start forgetting the daily tasks in our work lists. We drop our level of understanding and recalling capacities. We prepare ourselves mentally for important business meetings but we miss out few important points in a meeting. We recollect and remember all those points just after the meeting ends. Or when we are relaxed, conscious or alert.

A very common example of such a phenomena is a disturbance in our reading capabilities. When we start reading a book from page 1 to page 10, we leave our conscious reading somewhere around page 4; but still our eyes keep reading physically up to page 10. Somehow, we realise by the 10th page that we understood the context only up to page 4. Then we start reading again from the page 4. This is where the movies started. Somewhere between Page 4 and Page 10..!

This phenomenon peeps in many aspects of our life. According to our research, lot of us are facing this serious problem within ourselves. Making unnecessary movies in our mind create stress. Resultantly ir affects our productivity and we start facing imbalances between our work and personal life.

For professional help, contact: +91–98220–24674 | jeevan@mindhealth.in

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