In the hectic world that we live in today, you’ll probably think that multi-tasking is a skill to be admired, something that’s even necessary! If that’s the case, then this article probably isn’t for you. True, there are times when there are just too many things to do and multi-tasking seems like the only way to get them done. But for the things that are really crucial, focus and concentration is the name of the game, particularly in business.

Serious entrepreneurs the world over will all say the same thing: a truly successful entrepreneur does not multi-task!

So what is “multi-tasking”? Simply put, it is doing a number of tasks simultaneously at a given time. This is usually done so that plenty of work can be done over a short amount of time.

An example that many of us do without even noticing it is listening to a news report while sipping coffee while reading the newspaper while keeping an eye on your kid or sibling while they finish their breakfast. Without even intending or noticing it, that’s four things at once! Cool, right?

Multi-tasking is okay, if the activities that you are taking care of are fairly simple and somewhat routine in nature. In technical terms, this is called “continuous partial attention” where one does a number of things at a time and that these tasks are not studied in depth. And this is rarely the case for a successful entrepreneur.

What a successful entrepreneur needs is full concentration. Just imagine yourself talking with a customer. It wouldn’t be nice on their part if you were talking to them and at the same time doing something else like checking your phone, or reading an e-mail.

The Costs in Switching Tasks

The effect on the human brain of multi-tasking and its effects on productivity have long since been studied by experimental psychologists. Studies have shown that there is a “switching” cost of four minutes to get back to maximum productivity in between switching tasks. Get back to the first example. It will take you approximately sixteen minutes to complete a cycle of multi-tasking with maximum productivity. For a serious entrepreneur, those sixteen minutes is too much to waste.

So do you still want to multi-task? Sure, a serious entrepreneur has a great number of things to do. If it were possible, there should be more than 24 hours in a day!

What any successful entrepreneur should do, however, is finish one task at a time. On the average, you may have the same result as compared to doing portions of each task. The benefit comes from the non-quantifiable things that you get out of completing tasks one at a time. You get less stressed simply because you’ll have one frame of thought at a time. As a result, as you shred off tasks one by one, you have less and less things to think about. And this, perhaps, is the secret of success for any serious entrepreneur!

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