Parallel tasking – one of the highly used word couples in the current days of high efficiency and productivity. We often push others and ourselves to do parallel tasking. Doing 3-4 jobs at the same time is our expectation. Even sometimes we forget the effectiveness or precision of the job. But is it really possible to be a parallel tasker as per the human brain capacity? If yes, what is the limit? If no, why no?
As per the scientific evidence, the human brain is not parallel tasking or multitasking. We have one of the most mature and smartest brains in the animal kingdom. But this brain can’t process a lot of information at the same time. Yes, this is the biggest reality. So when you are pushing your brain to multitask, you are basically asking it to do something against its normal flow. When we focus on a few tasks at the same time, our brain rapidly switches among the tasks. This kind of switch is very harmful for the brain. Even multitasking is also associated with anxiety and blood pressure. With this kind of health issue, some studies show that doing several tasks at the same time decreases our productivity by at least 60% and our IQ by more than ten points! With this kind of decrease, parallel tasking only increases one thing – the possibility of making mistakes! On the other hand, focusing only on one task at a time improves our productivity, level of concentration, quality of the job and reduces the possibility of making mistakes.
In that case what you will choose? Parallel tasking? Or Series tasking (doing one job after finishing another one)? For sure you should choose series tasking. But there is another way to increase your productivity. What is it? It’s passive tasking! I am not sure this is used somewhere else, but I use this term frequently. We all know about passive income. Passive income is getting money not actively investing your time. Like returns from the stock market. If you buy a good stock, even when you are sleeping, your income will be ok. It’s not your office job, where you need to actively invest your time for your month end salary. Passive tasking is like that. Your job will be done, but without your active time allocation. So, someone or something else will do your job. Normally we all have some job which we can make done by someone or something else. Don’t think only about your official jobs. Most of the day we all have both official and personal jobs. Some of us delegate the jobs to others as well. But we do it at the wrong time. How? If you really have some passive tasks to be done by others, you should pass the message to them at the beginning of the day. Why? If it’s a human who will do the task, he has some priority list. The sooner you will share your task with him, the bigger the possibilities that you will be in his top priority list! If you share something at the mid or end of the day, he has already completed his top priority list and your priority will be maybe tomorrow not today!
So, the choice is yours. You can try to be a multitasker or you can be a passive tasker. If you have the chance for passive tasking, manage it smartly. Be calm and be productive! And if you don’t have an option of passive tasking, focus on a single task at a time. Be calm and be productive here as well.