Are you Multitasking? you should stop, here is why

We are good at synchronising ourselves with an electronical system, we actually feel a bit good about it by now. But how does it influence us?
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As a freelancer I, as many other people, need to manage my time in a smart way. Most of the time I find myself doing a few things at once. Jumping between platforms and tasks. I do a bit of Instagram before reading my e-mails and then finish quoting a project, after that I read a bit and start editing a video, I want to keep studying a new language in my language app and maintain my website and social pages, this is changing with some fluid importance and, all in all, makes me tired. I feel like I can be more effective. Sometimes I put my phone on airplane mode and find that I get much more work done and my "thought power" is greater. I feel better in the end of the day and have more energy for other aspects of life.

I read a very interesting article by Neta Gurevich published in Haaretz magazine which is tapping exactly to those points and more, I decided to make a small summary of some sections I found extremely important to share.

Since the late 60's when the internet was born it went through many changes and stages of development and it is obviously still is. But it's pretty much clear that today it is the tool of all causes, or at least, used by most. while this is true there is still a force that is eventually controlling the "highway" and is holding most power, this is dictated from natural causes, which is in this case money and information.
Platforms today, while serving a human condition, are built to make money, gather information, not really just connecting people.
The way it works is quite simple, free platforms take information about the users and sell it to advertisers, the longer you are logged in the more information they gather, the better advertisers can sell you things.
So all of the social platforms are designed to keep you scrolling.

At this point we are so synchronized that our availability became the most important value. We need to appear and maintain all of our channels and our response rate has became so fast that we are constantly apologizing for being late for it is almost impossible to keep up.
People started using the term "multitasking" which is an impossible term, what we call multitasking is actually called "task switching". Apparently our brains are not capable, except of rare conditions, of performing two or more tasks at the same time. What happens is that we just switch between tasks constantly and rapidly.
When we answer a message while watching a movie and talking to a friend we are not performing three actions at the same time but switching our attention from one thing to another and again.
When we are finished with a "multi-tasking" session we are left with no more than a bunch of vague grey experiences and memories.
Thinking we can multitask is our mistake of trying to be more like the technology we are using and we think we are great in that. A series of researches done in Stanford University show that while people that are practicing a lot of Multi Tasking show publicly a lot of confidence in their many actions but, especially they, display the lowest performance.

Switching between tasks takes a toll on us, the price of the switch is changing in accordance of the task but affects us not only by lower attention but increasing our stress levels.
There is a substantial decrease in our effectiveness, researches show that people who work in "line" get 50% more done than those who work symoltanicly.
Apparently also the quality of what we do is decreased since our ability of judging what is important is affected as well resulting a lower quality of our actions.
A research done in London University shows that multitasking leads to decrease in the i.q. levels to those of people who didn't sleep a whole night. Some of the testers showed a decrease of 15 points that left them with the IQ level of an 8 year old.

We read all text as if it is our news feed in Facebook.
There is a static text and data flows. News feed is a flowing text, it is determined by time, location and momentary context, it is short and quick to grasp. It is built for our brain to get satisfied quickly. Static text are longer, not determined by when they were created and mostly are longer and more complicated.

The problem is that we seem to do a bad job in differentiating between the two, we read long complicated texts as if we could just scroll through them. Bottom line is, we need to know how to make a decision when to give more attention to an important text, if it is something we want to remember we better print it on a paper.

So to summarize, you should definitely consider taking the phone away when you need to get some work done, print important text to read separately on actual paper, start planning your tasks in a line rather than multi task.
You will start feeling better, less stressed and might actually get something done and in a better quality.

This is only a part of an article I read and found extremely important, I think the internet is amazing but we really need to learn how to live with it.

Link to the original article - https://www.haaretz.co.il/magazine/.premium-MAGAZINE-1.4662369