Is your to-do list filled to the brim, leaving important tasks undone at the end of each day? If so, you’re not alone. It’s an all-too-common problem these days, as distractions of all sorts suck up valuable time.

Making matters worse, many mistakenly believe that multi-tasking is the way to wring maximum efficiency out of every minute, when in fact the converse is true.

Focusing on one task at a time is actually far more efficient than multi-tasking, and the proof of this has even been scientifically established.

In the video above, Dr. Theo Compernolle, a Belgian physician with experience in clinical psychiatry, neuropsychiatry, and neurology discusses how multitasking efficiently is neurologically impossible for your thinking brain, and how understanding the inner workings of your brain can dramatically improve your productivity.

To Get More Done, Quit MultiTasking

Multitasking is the primary enemy if you want to get more done, because it requires your brain to go through a number of different maneuvers that sabotages productivity.

To switch between tasks, your brain must take the complex creative ideas you were thinking about and put them into temporal memory. Then, it must clean out your working memory, and go to long-term memory to retrieve the information you need to address the new task.

When you switch back to the first task you were working on, your brain has to go through the entire sequence again. With each switch, you end up losing time and efficiency.

Multitasking is also a major cause of errors and mistakes — due to the way your brain works — so you can also make great gains in work quality by learning to focus on one thing at a time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEpiF3MH82s