My parents were in town this weekend, visiting myself and my husband. And my husband was ‘on-call’ for his job so he had to carry his work phone everywhere we went. We were out to breakfast on Sunday and a call came in. Drew had to head out to a place called Millers Island, to look at a malfunctioning air conditioning unit.
My husband said his good-byes, telling my parents that if they had left while he was gone, he would understand. Then he turned to me and said he would be home in about two hours.
“No way!” my mother exclaimed. “You have to take the Beltway across Baltimore and you expect to get there, do your work and get back in just two hours. You’ll never do it.”
Drew was determined to prove her wrong and just fifty minutes later, as my mother and I drove from the grocery store, a call came in on my Bluetooth. “I beat you home. Back already. Two hours flat.”
My mother was shocked.
Well, don’t tell Drew I am sharing this story with you, but guess what? He got called back. To the same house, right as he and I were about to have dinner.
He was furious. Fuming mad. Talking to himself. Muttering under his breath. The night was ruined.
While Drew was upset with the design of the system, the colleague who did the maintenance on it, and even my mother for ‘making him take that bet’- he was mostly disappointed in himself. Why? Because he was multi-tasking. And what does that do? It leads to rushing. And mistakes.
[Tweet “Here’s the top three reasons why you need to avoid multi-tasking.”]
- Multi-tasking splits focus. When we are not fully present, we make mistakes. In healthcare, we know that these errors can lead to small problems or huge near death misses. Let’s do ourselves and our patients a favor and stick to the task at hand.
- Multi-tasking makes you tired. When you focus on more than one thing at a time, you actually drain your energy. This is because our brains are not wired to split attention. Â An article I published on this very topic links over to the science behind multi-tasking. Check it out (after you finish reading this, LOL) here.
- Multi-tasking takes longer. As in the case of my husband’s call above, he actually wound up working a lot more than the two hours he bet my mother. He didn’t get back home last night until well after 9:30 pm. The distracted and rushed work he did the first time around led to him having to go back and double the effort, energy and time spent on the job.
I recently got my very first electronic device, a tablet. I could not stand the silly notifications in the upper left hand corner. So much so I turned all of the settings on my apps to ‘off’. When I went to do this the device asked me, “Are you sure you want to do that? You may miss some very important information.”
Guess what? I miss more information when I am distracted by every single bell and whistle. Nurses are too. We have got alarms, pagers and interruptions out the yin-yang. Let’s all take a moment to exhale. Come present. And be in the here-and-now.
What would you add to the above list? Share another reason with us on how avoiding multi-tasking is beneficial to nursing practice. I would love to hear from you and I am sure others would learn as well. Thanks for reading and enjoy your health today.
I am the queen of multi-tasking! My husband is always telling me to stop doing so many things at one time. Even when we’re talking on the phone, he can hear back noise and knows I am multi-tasking and never misses a chance to bring it to my attention. I have had times when it has back-fired and I realize that it can cause issues but I still continue to do it. I feel that I MUST finish all these things or life as I know it will end! LOL! This has brought it right out in the open and opened my eyes to the chances of making a mistake which is what I try to avoid at all costs. I will do my best and try not to multi-task especially at work and see how things go. I am betting that life will continue and even if I finish a little later than I had hoped, it will be safer and I will be less exhausted!