Here is a guaranteed way to overwhelm your brain and stress yourself out – keep switching rapidly between tasks without completing any of them.
Every time we switch from task A to B, we incur a cost. Our brain doesn’t fully let go of task A even though we have moved on – there is an attention residue.
And the more often we switch, the more we put our brain (and its prefrontal cortex) under stress.
Solution?
Take one task at a time. Complete it, or at least a substantial chunk of it and then move to the next one.
But will it not slow you down? No, on the contrary, you will get a lot more done.
Frantically switching between tasks is a recipe for high-stress and low efficiency. Further, you will never experience the deep absorption of the flow state.
If there was a lose-lose proposition, it is this.
Monotasking should be our mantra – one thing at a time, while everything else waits for its turn.
– Rajan