Unravel the intriguing world of multitasking, a skill often misunderstood yet profoundly impactful. Discover how juggling multiple tasks can enhance productivity, stimulate creativity, and foster adaptability, transforming everyday challenges into opportunities for growth and success.
Might multitasking actually increase our mental activity?
A UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School researcher set out to find answers.
- More tasks, more ideas: The Positive Spillover Effects of Multitasking on Subsequent Creativity
- The researchers dug into the subject with a mix of lab experiments and data collection from real-world scenarios.
Business Implications
The research suggests that how we design and schedule our work can impact outcomes we care about, such as creativity
- We can be more balanced in how we think of our multitasking
- This research gives us a little bit of flexibility to say, ‘There are some tasks I have to be careful about, but there also are benefits to multitasking.'”
Does multitasking boost creativity?
Melwani and Kapadia conducted an experiment that simulates a common, real-world multitasking scenario
- They set up 240 students in cubicles with personal computers and gave them information about their schedules and roles as student representatives of their university
- Each student had to complete two tasks
- Listen to a conference call about finding new ways to fund student organizations
- Send three emails scheduling meetings
- Find as many uses for a brick as possible
- Students who multitasked were more creative
- Multitasking didn’t influence their analytical performance
Charging up the brain
Melwani and Kapadia began with a model of the cognitive processes that links multitasking and creativity: Multitasking -> Activation -> Cognitive flexibility -> Creativity
- They found that those two mental states, in that order, led to greater creativity.
- To see if the activation and cognitive flexibility are important mediators in real-world environments, they conducted a study of restaurant servers.
