Karen Finerman Quotes

Faced with a time shortage, we squeeze tasks into the nooks and crannies of our calendar, leaving less and less time to switch between them. As a result, we become less and less productive exactly when we need to be most productive.

I'll always be working on five things at once, usually with those documents open at the same time because if I get stuck somewhere I'll jump over to something else. That's how my head has always worked.

Experts say you can't concentrate on more than one task at a time.

Even though we think we're getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient.

Multi-taskers often think they are like gym rats, bulking up their ability to juggle tasks, when in fact they are like alcoholics, degrading their abilities through over-consumption.

Most of the work on multitasking suggests that it generally makes you less efficient, not more.

Whenever you're doing two things at once, you're compromising them both.

By the time the people asking the questions are ready for the answers, the people doing the work have lost track of the questions.

A committee is a group that keeps minutes and loses hours.

No one would choose to be jerked randomly off task again and again until you have half a dozen things you're trying to get done, all at the same time.

You can't work on 15 problems at the same time.

I am a world expert on how to organise tasks in a senseless order, totally unrelated to priority, and thus create a massive panic leading up to an important deadline.

Task switching is hard because we do not control what is on our mind. Despite our efforts, the original task continues to occupy our mental bandwidth. Although we can control where our time goes, we cannot fully control how our bandwidth is allocated.

I have a crazy amount of different jobs, so the way I manage that is to not do more than one at a time. It's like old computers that had small memory chips, they would do something called swapping, where they would fill the memory with one task, do it and get it out.

Email is having an increasingly pernicious effect. Not only is it having a perceptible effect on productivity, it's skewing what it is we focus on. The immediate increasingly crowds out the important.

Multitasking is a part of my everyday life.

I believe that one can indeed work on two or more tasks at once, but in ways yet to be understood.

It's hard to watch something go on and be talking at the same time.

If I just do it, it will take less time than telling someone what I'm thinking, and have them free associate, and then come back to me and I'll hate it and I'll have to redo it.

There's no such thing as multitasking.

I think women are really good at multitasking. Men just cannot do it.

I think that we get so distracted with our smartphones... It takes your body and your brain time to switch between tasks. If we can focus on what we're doing, we'll be more productive at that task.

I do think to some extent multitasking is a way of fooling ourselves that we're being exceptionally efficient.

One of the best ways of avoiding necessary and even urgent tasks is to seem to be busily employed on things that are already done.

What looks like multitasking is really switching back and forth between multiple tasks, which reduces productivity and increases mistakes by up to 50 percent.