The Cost of Multitasking

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The idea that there's the switching cost is something that goes back to research from even the early 20th century. But a researcher named Sophie Leroy more recently really applied this idea of switching costs to exactly the context of working in an office. She had subjects come into this research and they were giving them office work style tasks, like reading resumes or trying to summarize and rank candidates. And you could just see it drop. You can just watch the numbers as it drops the call us information when they're working on puzzles.

Cal Newport reveals how the rise of email led to a productivity disaster and what we can do to change that.

— YOU’LL LEARN —

1) How email changed the way we work for worse

2) Simple strategies for cutting down the email back-and-forth

3) Why we feel guilty when we don’t respond—and what to do about it

Subscribe or visit AwesomeAtYourJob.com/ep647 for clickable versions of the links below.

— ABOUT CAL —

Cal Newport is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University. In addition to researching cutting edge technology, he also writes about the impact of these innovations on our culture. Newport is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller, Digital Minimalism, which argues that we should be much more selective about the technologies we adopt in our personal lives, and Deep Work, which argues that focus is the new I.Q. in the modern workplace.

Newport’s work has been published in over 25 languages and has been featured in many major publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, Washington Post, and Economist, and his long-running blog Study Hacks, which receives over 3 million visits a year. He’s also a frequent guest on NPR.

• Cal’s book: A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

• Cal’s book: Deep Work (Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)

• Cal’s podcast: Deep Questions

• Cal’s planner: Time Block Planner

• Cal’s website: CalNewport.com

— RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE SHOW —

• App: Calendly

• App: Trello

• Researcher: Sophie Leroy

• Book: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman

• Previous episode: 632: How to Reclaim 40 Hours Every Month (WITHOUT Multitasking!) with Dave Crenshaw

— THANK YOU SPONSORS! —