When you shift focus from one task to another, that transition is neither fast nor smooth. Instead, there is a lag time during which your brain must yank itself from the initial task and then glom onto the new task. This shift, though it feels instantaneous, takes time. In fact, up to 40 percent more time than single tasking - especially for complex tasks.
-Jim Taylor, Ph.D, for psychologytoday.com
Working in a service field is often (if not usually) about multitasking. However, we are learning more and more that traditional multitasking—actually trying to accomplish more than one task simultaneously or constantly switching between multiple incomplete tasks—is inefficient and is lowering your productivity. Numerous studies have shown that for the vast majority of people, trying to work on multiple tasks at the same time (especially three or more) not only means slower overall work times than doing each of those tasks one at a time, but more and more mistakes, leading to even more time spent later having to correct them. In fact, multitasking is estimated to cause up to a 40% loss in productivity, as Dr. Taylor notes.
So why do we do it? In some cases, it is because we truly are in situations where we have multiple tasks asked of us that need to be done at the same time. Or, conversely, we don’t have enough asked of us at a particular moment. Or, we live in a culture where multitasking has become ingrained. Whatever the reason, clearly we can’t be our best in or outside the office without understanding the bad parts of multitasking and how we can avoid them. While we can not usually give up what we call "multitasking" cold turkey, we can make a concerted effort to prioritize our tasks so that any switching we have to do is kept to a minimum. So turn off your email alerts for part of the day, keep your phone out of your eyeline, and consider a tracking program like RescueTime that will let you understand more about where your time (and focus) is actually going.