Could multitasking be damaging your business?

Sarah Furness spent 21 years as a helicopter pilot and squadron leader in the Royal Air Force. “Leading operational combat tours of up to 120 people in places like Afghanistan and Iraq gave me a strong foundation in terms of performance, resilience and leadership”, she says. “It didn’t take me long to realise that those are things that a lot of people want to learn more about.” 

After leaving, Sarah began to explore mindfulness as a way to handle the strong emotions and inner battles she faced. “Once you become aware of your own narrative, you start to become more aware of other people’s”, she continues. “You can see how everyone’s just sort of putting a brave face on for a lot of things.”

Sarah trained as a mindfulness coach and cognitive therapist, but she realised early on that people were more keen to hear about the military than mindfulness. “They wanted to know how my military career had helped me perform and lead under pressure and deal with stress”, she explains. “I began to pull out the mindfulness and mindset techniques that were embedded in our military training”. 

However, Sarah is turning some of her military training on its head. “When I first applied to be an RAF pilot, I had to take a multitasking aptitude test”, she explains. “Multitasking is often seen as a badge of honour when it comes to productivity, but this shouldn’t be the case.”

Instead, Sarah favours a uni-tasking approach: the subject of her Vistage session on September 24th. 

We are humans, not computers

Sarah came to the realisation that we, as humans, are not designed for multitasking. “Computers are able to switch very quickly between programs, and that’s essentially what multitasking is”, she explains. “We can do that to a degree, but we just don’t perform as well when we do.”

Mindfulness, says Sarah, is about focusing your attention where you want it to be. “Your attention can only be in one place at a time”, she continues. “With that in mind, we, as humans, can’t really multitask – we can only task-switch.”

Society has us believe that multitasking is the holy grail in the workplace. However, focusing on more than one task at once, says Sarah, is impossible – and attempting to do so can have a greater negative impact on your business than you may realise. 

Could you be damaging your business?

Our natural response, when we’re busy, is to attempt to multitask. “It’s precisely this multitasking that leads us to be less productive, however”, Sarah highlights. “Not only are we doing less, we’re working harder to do less – which not only reduces our output, it also increases our stress.”

This vicious cycle results in employee burnout, reducing morale and increasing absenteeism. “You’ll find that people will end up working longer or harder to get the job done”, Sarah says. “They’ll open their laptop on holiday, and they’ll lose their work-life balance.”

Sarah’s proposed solution – and the topic of her Vistage session – is uni-tasking. 

“This isn’t simply just doing one thing at a time for the rest of your life – that’s not realistic”, she explains. “It’s about realising you’ll perform better and feel better when you choose to focus on one thing at a time.”

Uni-tasking is the act of prioritising your high-value tasks each day, enabling you to perform those tasks better and more quickly. 

“There may be other tasks that you can multitask as they’re easier and require less concentration”, continues Sarah. “However, by taking a step back and defining your most important task – the one that requires your full attention and needs your best results – you can make sure that task is done to the best of your ability.”

Why you should attend Sarah’s session

If you’re looking to become more efficient and less stressed, Sarah’s Vistage session is for you. 

“We’re quite stuck in our ways, as humans”, says Sarah. “Switching from multitasking to uni-tasking can seem like too much work to put into practice. By releasing yourself from the myth that multitasking is the only way, though – by giving yourself permission to switch your focus – you’ll unlock a far more efficient and less stressful way of working, building a truly high-performance team.”

Learn more about Sarah’s session and sign up here.

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