Imagine you had complete freedom to structure a single hour of your workday for maximum productivity and happiness.
Would you labor uninterrupted over a single project — or would you divide the hour into a few different slots, one for a client phone call, one for weeding through your inbox, and one for making headway on that project?
If you're like most people, you'd choose the latter option. But you wouldn't be doing yourself any favors.
According to research from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, we generally assume that multitasking will make us happier than focusing on a single activity. And we're right — sort of.
"We are told over and over again that variety is the spice of life, the key to happiness," study co-author Jordan Etkin tells Business Insider. "But we don't always experience variety as positive."
When we're engaged in different tasks over the course of a long period of time — say, a day or a week — we do in fact feel happier. But when we're constantly switching up our activity within the span of 10 minutes or an hour, we actually feel less happy.
In one telling experiment, researchers instructed some college students to spend an hour studying for a bunch of different classes and told others to study for a single class. When the hour was up, the first group said they felt less productive, and therefore less happy, than students in the second group.
The researchers suspect that it all boils down to how productive you feel, which in Western cultures is key to happiness. Switching back and forth between different tasks over a short time period is "costly in terms of our cognitive resources," Etkin says. That leaves us feeling stressed and limits our ability to perform well on any single task.
"Even if we accomplish what we set out to, we don't feel as productive," Etkin says.
Of course, the easy solution would be to divide the day into hour-long slots in which we focus on single tasks. But few of us actually have the liberty to do so, when the boss needs a project update in the next 15 minutes and there are 12 urgent emails in our inbox.
Fortunately, the researchers suggest a simple psychological hack to overcome this problem. If you're obligated to perform multiple tasks at once, mentally bucket them under a single category.
So, for example, while you're responding to those emails and banging out that project update, tell yourself that everything you're doing is work-related. Or you could imagine that all those tasks are helping you get a promotion. Simply reducing the perception of task variety, without changing anything about the tasks themselves, is enough to make us feel happy and productive.
Then, when you've got a whole Sunday to spend as you please, you can bounce around between working out, cooking, and socializing with friends — a surefire recipe for feeling happy and energized when you're back at the office Monday morning.
GMT 08:43 2018 Tuesday ,11 December
Huawei executive's bail hearing to resume TuesdayGMT 16:27 2018 Monday ,10 December
Russian ex-policeman convicted of killing almost 80 womenGMT 10:10 2018 Thursday ,22 November
Drug smuggler freed from Bali jail arrives home in AustraliaGMT 11:58 2018 Sunday ,11 November
Australian police arrest woman for needles inside strawberriesGMT 07:44 2018 Friday ,09 November
Imelda Marcos faces prison after corruption convictionsGMT 08:48 2018 Thursday ,01 November
Peru opposition leader Fujimori to be jailed for 36 monthsGMT 12:45 2018 Thursday ,20 September
Palestinian writer released after serving time in Israeli prison for her poemGMT 11:42 2018 Tuesday ,23 January
80 pc school janitors found working without work visaMaintained and developed by Arabs Today Group SAL.
All rights reserved to Arab Today Media Group 2021 ©
Maintained and developed by Arabs Today Group SAL.
All rights reserved to Arab Today Media Group 2021 ©
Send your comments
Your comment as a visitor