This post is not about ethics.
It is about productivity, which, at some point in time, can / must be part of your ethics.
Some employers (including Ethicontrol) believe that it is an employee’s responsibility to take care of a company’s resources and avoid wasting them.
Though this is part of Ethicontrol internal communication to support the company-wide ban on multitasking and multiple-tab browsing — it might be useful for any team.
Does the usage of multiple browser tabs have any impact on you, your health, and your productivity?
Of course, the short answer is YES!
But, before answering further, we must define the use cases:
- Research. You google something and open dozens of tabs simultaneously to check what you were looking for.
- Parallel run. You work on a single task, but you still need other tabs for assistance, inspiration, lookup, translation, visual search, or simply for background music. For example, you are writing a blog post and in parallel when needed check on a thesaurus, Google Translate, or a stock images bank. Or you have your corporate Slack or Gmail open in a tab together with Spotify with a Deep concentration playlist.
- Common mode. When you do not close some tabs aiming to remember something, or just forgot to close sessions, or you are struggling with multitasking and performing some tasks.
We will leave ‘Research and Parallel run’ untouched for now and focus on the most popular Common mode. Each time I sit down by my colleagues, I notice at least 20 open tabs, and sometimes our Mac users have up to five separate virtual desktops with 10+ additional Chrome tabs open on each of the screens. When discussing this issue, each “multitasker” pretends to be a super-effective multitasker, so let us look at the problems from a multitasking perspective.
Is it multitasking skills or a lack of focusing skills?
Let’s look at what arguments we found.
1. You slow yourself down.
Each time when you open too many tabs, you overload your computer hardware. Assuming that current computers and gadgets have become extensions of our brains, some analysts say that the same happens with your mind. In other words, you are merely slowing yourself down.
An additional argument found in the research brought by Browser Tabs Are Ruining Your Brain, here’s what to do about it by Angela Lashbrook, One Zero
2. Your brain cannot multitask, and your tasks will suffer.
One of the cited studies has been researching whether people were as efficient as they were feeling during multitasking. And it appeared that:
Multitasking splits your brain. It creates some kind of “spotlights”.
I would compare this with an old and slow printer which cannot print a complete picture at once and gradually line by line draw something unknown which can be identified much later.
This means that multitasking is not a feature of the brain; it is a term that does not have anything in common with physiology.
Clifford Nass from Stanford was looking for evidence to prove the “outstanding skills” of multitaskers had found the exact opposite.
3. Multitasking is for outliers, and you are not one of them—your overestimation s*cks.
David Strayer, a professor of psychology at the University of Utah, proved that most people could not combine tasks. For example, multitasking while driving and using a cell phone significantly decreases the ability to notice essential things on the road (children, bicyclists, signs, and billboards).
Later, Strayer did discover anomalies that proved that only two percent of the population could multitask without a negative impact on performance. And this fraction is far beyond any normal distribution curves, so there is very little chance you meet such a person at the office desk.
He also discovered that most people heavily overestimate their multitasking skills:
Furthermore, being a heavy multitasker rarely means that the tasks will be done with good quality. Similar to Strayer’s research was done at Stanford University, proving that:
4. When you multitask, you are stupid.
Researchers from the University of London studied discovered that:
5. You may also negatively affect your mood and stress.
A therapist Lorena Ramos, MA, LCSW has been studying the effects of the clutter created by numerous screens and tabs.
6. You can damage your brain by multitasking and become a psycho without EQ and a career.
by Travis Bradberry, Forbes
Needless to say that cognitive and emotional control are parts of emotional intelligence (EQ) which has a significant impact on your career success.
Conclusion
Numerous open tabs are bad! And multitasking is a very lame excuse for keeping multiple tabs open.
Multitasking itself is a myth that can be dangerous for you and our company.
Each time identify a use case of multi-tabbing and, if it is not a Research or Parallel run, make sure you use not more than one tab at a time.
Use Evernote or Get Pocket to park your tabs and clear both your brain’s cache and your browser’s.
And remember — your multitasking means poor prioritization skills!
Image credits: The Next Web, Giphy, Memegenrator, OS X Daily