3 Biggest Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Multi-task, Backed Up By 3 Medical Publications

Luke Manimala
1 min readApr 26, 2022

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I have been working or studying full-time for some decades now.

Since starting, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with multi-tasking, defined by Webster as when you perform multiple tasks at once.

Someone told most of us that multitasking is a good thing, and I’m sure many of us even had “Strong multi-tasker” on our resumes at one particular time.

However, according to three medical publications, multitasking is detrimental, namely the American Psychological Association, the National Library of Medicine, and USC Dornsife. There are three themes around their reasons why.

Here they are and how you can avoid these pitfalls of “multitasking.”

  1. The human brain cannot physically perform two complex tasks simultaneously. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re doing two things; you’re most definitely only doing one (well).
  2. The start of each new task is proven to be slower and less accurate: Minimize this switch cost by completing one task at a time.
  3. You diminish your ability to distinguish relevant from irrelevant when “multi-tasking”: Instead, remaining focused on a single workstream allows your brain to filter out irrelevant information automatically.

RIP multi-tasking ☠️

✌🏽 @lukemanimala

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Luke Manimala
Luke Manimala

Written by Luke Manimala

Chicago-based product designer. I am working to find the story and value in every product through thoughtful execution and innovative design.

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