Multitasking skills are the practice of performing numerous tasks at the same time. It may be beneficial for a company to have employees with good multitasking skills because it would improve the company’s productivity, but are they really effective? Find out the answer below.

What are multitasking skills?

Employees, most of the time, are required to be able to handle more than one project at once. That is what is called multitasking. The concept of multitasking literally means having multiple responsibilities or performing many activities or tasks at the same time.

Humans are actually habituated to multitasking in everyday life, such as accepting a phone call while typing or performing a task while listening to music.

Multitasking Skills, Helpful or Harmful?

People do multitasking to save time. However, research shows that multitasking is unnecessary and can damage someone’s health. It is true somehow since multitasking requires more energy and focus compared to when people do one activity at one time.

Thus, it needs a specific strategy in implementing it, unless you want to have low quality outcomes or some things like these happen:

Reducing Productivity

Productivity is not about the quantity of jobs that someone has accomplished, but also the quality of work produced. Multitasking is often used to make the work progress quickly.

Unfortunately, with an additional burden on the brain, someone will likely perform low quality work. This will impact his achievement in general because it decreases his productivity as well.

Increasing Stress Level

Stress caused by a job will increase as a result of the responsibility of excessive labor and poor outcomes. Burnout is a general term for the stress caused by multitasking exhaustion. This can further affect a person’s capacity to process information and, worst case, he will lose work motivation.

How to Develop Multitasking Skills

Multitasking skills may impact work outcomes badly if the doer does not know how to do it right. However, once they know how to handle it, this skill would give them more advantages than disadvantages. Here are tips on how to develop and improve your multitasking skill.

Create a To-Do List

First, make a list of the tasks that must be performed within a particular amount of time. Determine your own deadlines and work priorities. This way you can prevent forgetting your tasks and responsibilities. After doing it several times, you may be able to do some tasks at the same time.

Focus on Related Tasks

Try to focus on related tasks. Why? Because doing irrelevant tasks at the same time can cause stress since your brain is pushed to work harder to change concentration between disparate tasks.

Maintain Your Concentration

If you are just starting to develop your multitasking skill, avoid doing more than two tasks at once. Two tasks at the same time are considered as ideal numbers to build a habit for multitasking skills. Once you are used to doing two tasks at the same time, you can try to have three or more tasks at the same time.

Take a Break

To avoid burnout, you must manage your rest time effectively. If you feel like you need more energy, you can take a break for recharging. Getting a few hours of sleep won’t help you become more productive.

In summary, multitasking is a fundamental ability in the workplace. Multitasking can impact negatively –stress, hard to focus, poor outcomes– on employee job performance if it is not done properly. However, several tips above will help you develop a good multitasking skill. So, say bye-bye to burnout!