Feel as though you are constantly juggling too much on your plate? You’re far from alone!
We have two big problems today:
- the amount of information we deal with in a day has grown significantly vs. even a few years ago
- we think we can keep up by doing many things at once
Neuroscience finds that multitasking is a myth
Daniel J. Levitin details the science of how our brains really work in his bestseller The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. He describes in detail how multitasking actually makes us less productive.
Levitin is a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montréal where he runs the Laboratory for Music Cognition, Perception, and Expertise. You may have read his previous bestseller This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. I attended his talk at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management last August, the day The Organized Mind was launched.
For this story for CPA Magazine, I interviewed two busy CPAs to find out how they deal with today’s busy job demands: Mark Whitmore, managing partner at Deloitte; and Carlo Sistilli, CFO of Arista Homes Ltd. I also spoke to two workplace productivity experts: Wendy Woods, a consultant specializing in resiliency, leadership and productivity and owner of Toronto-based Watershed Training Solutions; and Patricia Katz, a productivity and balance strategist based in Saskatoon and owner of Pauseworks.
Together with Levitin’s neuroscience, these four story sources provided lots of helpful tips for busy professional accountants, but the learning applies to anybody working with a continually changing stream of information, tasks and projects.
Click the image below to read the story online.
