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.
| Working time being a function of productivity is also a limited resource, so you cannot maintain the integrity by procrastinating or killing your productivity. |
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.
Of course, the short answer is YES!
But, before answering further, we must define the use cases:
| And this has already caused a delay in some of our internal deadlines. |
Let’s look at what arguments we found.
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.
| … You are actually looking to overload information in your brain. This will not only affect the brain’s efficiency, but it can further shorten your attention span overall. We are constantly trusting an assumption about ourselves that we all are multi-talented, especially when it comes to our browsers, whereas we are just procrastinating the way we do in real life. |
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
| Poorly-organized computer screens affected physicians’ response times and productivity in emergency rooms. It found that cluttered screens slowed their work with electronic medical records, and it was even worse when users were stressed. |
One of the cited studies has been researching whether people were as efficient as they were feeling during multitasking. And it appeared that:
| Although you feel great during multitasking, your real results were much worse than that of people who didn’t multitask. Our brains can’t multitask at all! |
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.
| It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. People who multitask a lot are in fact a lot worse at filtering irrelevant information and also perform significantly worse at switching between tasks, compared to single-taskers. |
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:
| The better someone thought she was (at multitasking), the more likely it was that her performance was well below par. |
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:
| Heavy multitaskers—that is, those people who habitually engaged in multiple activities at once—fared worse than light multitaskers on measures of executive control and effective task switching. Multitasking a lot, in other words, appeared to make them worse at it” |
Researchers from the University of London studied discovered that:
| Multitasking with electronic media caused a greater decrease in IQ than smoking pot or losing a night's sleep. IQ drops of 15 points for multitasking men lowered their scores to the average range of an 8-year-old child. |
A therapist Lorena Ramos, MA, LCSW has been studying the effects of the clutter created by numerous screens and tabs.
| A cluttered computer screen can overstimulate your brain, making it more difficult for your mind to process information, generate mental exhaustion, as well as higher levels of anxiety and stress. |
| High multitaskers had less brain density in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region responsible for empathy as well as cognitive and emotional control. |
Needless to say that cognitive and emotional control are parts of emotional intelligence (EQ) which has a significant impact on your career success.
| Multitasking in meetings and other social settings indicates low self- and social awareness. 90% of top performers have high EQs. If multitasking does indeed damage the anterior cingulate cortex (a key brain region for EQ), it will lower your EQ in the process. |
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