Why Multitasking is Killing Your Productivity

This is for when you finish one of those 12 hour days and you just like, I have no idea what I did today. Welcome to lessons business school didn't teach you. Let's talk about context switching. So back to our lemonade stand. We've been running it a while, we've got two friends helping us out, and all three of you are going back and forth between three tasks. You're mixing up new lemonade, you're taking orders from customers and you're serving customers. Now, because all of you are switching back and forth, you can probably serve, let's say 20 customers an hour. But what if you reorganize the team and you assign one person to squeeze the lemons, one person to mix a lemonade, and now all you're doing is taking orders. You'll probably be able to serve 5 or 10 times the number of customers. This is because every time you switch tasks, it creates mental load and it slows you down. So three people doing just one thing each get more done than three people each doing three things at a time.