There are more and more reports that multitasking is not only inefficient, but also an increasing cause of burn out. While it might make you feel great to think you are doing a lot of things at the same time, the fact is: it doesn’t work. What you earn faster you’ll lose elsewhere.

Two usefull Harvard Business Review articles:

You Can’t Multitask, So Stop Trying

Based on over a half-century of cognitive science and more recent studies on multitasking, we know that multitaskers do less and miss information. It takes time (an average of 15 minutes) to re-orient to a primary task after a distraction such as an email. Efficiency can drop by as much as 40%. Long-term memory suffers and creativity — a skill associated with keeping in mind multiple, less common, associations — is reduced.

 

The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time:

Why is it that between 25 and 50 per cent of people report feeling overwhelmed or burned out at work?

It’s not just the number of hours we’re working, but also the fact that we spend too many continuous hours juggling too many things at the same time.

(…)

The biggest cost — assuming you don’t crash — is to your productivity. In part, that’s a simple consequence of splitting your attention, so that you’re partially engaged in multiple activities but rarely fully engaged in any one. In part, it’s because when you switch away from a primary task to do something else, you’re increasing the time it takes to finish that task by an average of 25 per cent.

 

Advices for managers from the same article:

1. Maintain meeting discipline.

2. Stop demanding or expecting instant responsiveness at every moment of the day.

3. Encourage renewal.

 

And advice for your personal productivity:

1. Do the most important thing first in the morning,

2. Establish regular, scheduled times to think more long term, creatively, or strategically.

3. Take real and regular vacations.