Meet with clients, check your e-mail, tighten the BlackBerry e-leash — how many balls are you juggling for work? While some experts believe multitasking is a viable solution in keeping productivity on the upswing, others disagree and even suggest it could make productivity worse.

In a recent New York Times report, Jonathan Spira, chief analyst at research firm Basex, estimated the cost of “interruptions” to the American economy at “nearly $650 billion a year.”

Extending this cautionary note, David Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan, says, “Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing chances of mistakes. Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.”

“But a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once,” said René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University, in The New York Times‘ “Slow Down, Brave Multitasker, and Don’t Read This in Traffic” report.

In an article in the journal Neuron last December, Marois and three other Vanderbilt researchers reported their use of magnetic resonance imaging to pinpoint the bottleneck in the brain and to measure how much efficiency is lost when trying to handle two tasks at once.

The researchers did not see a delay if participants were given certain tasks one at a time, but the researchers found response to a second task was delayed by up to a second when the study participants were given the two tasks at about the same time.

On the other hand, the increasingly noticeable ability of young workers who can simultaneously e-mail, instant message and talk on the phone while listening to music and search through Web sites — successfully — puts a kink in the popular, negative perceptions of multitasking.

The New York Times explained:

Recently completed research at the Institute for the Future of the Mind at Oxford University suggests the popular perception is open to question. A group of 18- to 21-year-olds and a group of 35- to 39-year-olds were given 90 seconds to translate images into numbers, using a simple code. The younger group did 10 percent better when not interrupted. But when both groups were interrupted by a phone call, a cellphone short-text message or an instant message, the older group matched the younger group in speed and accuracy.

In fact, increasingly more people disagree with such negativity or limitations associated with multitasking.

A study conducted for a cable TV network concluded that computers and portable technological devices (think MP3 players, CrackBerries, etc.) and constant Internet access have increased worker productivity by 50 percent, “due in part to their enablement of multitasking,” as we noted around this time last year.

This comes at a price, though: while workers are doing more in less time, however, multitasking and the bombardment of constant tech-enabled communication are increasing stress.

With all this in mind, the question remains: With our increasing dependency on our tech devices and our seeming inability to separate work life from personal life, how can we increase productivity?

Productivity, as defined by productivity blog 43 Folders editor Merlin Mann, is “getting more done in less time and with as little stress as humanly possible.” This is nothing new. However, as Mann aptly points out: “It’s not about making more widgets per hour; it’s about making time and attention for the things that you really value.”

Therefore, fellow multitaskers, the following are some basic tips for solving the time management issues so many of us face in our everyday work lives, courtesy of Mann via Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist blog:

1. Organize e-mail in file folders: “If the message needs more thought, move it to your ‘to do’ list. If it is for reference, print it out. If it’s a meeting, move it to your calendar. Take an action on an e-mail as soon as you read it.”

2. Limit multitasking. If this proves difficult, instead focus 100 percent on doing one thing or listening/absorbing one stream of information (i.e., practice mindfulness).

3. Do the most important thing first.

4. Check e-mail on a schedule — a few times a day should be sufficient.

5. Organize Web site addresses. Consider using book-marking services such as del.icio.us to keep track of sites, keeping the places you want to check out, places you want to keep as a reference, etc., all in one place with the ability to search and share your list easily.

6. An additional tip is to monitor productivity of the various tasks you do by time of day, and do the ones during the time of day when you are most productive at doing them.

7. Try to learn as many shortcuts as possible to minimize the number of keystrokes per task, as they eventually add up.

8. When starting projects, break them into chunks to make it easy getting started on the first chunk.

9. Write a “to do” list every day, whether by hand on paper or by keystroke with software.

Finally, “dare to be slow.” You want a reputation for high-quality work, and customers expect it. A good time manager responds to some things more slowly than a bad time manager would — recognizing that processing one’s work (evaluating what’s come in and how to handle it) and planning one’s work are mission-critical tasks.

Earlier

National Productivity, Multitasking Efficiency, Individual Engagement

Resources

Productivity and Costs, First Quarter 2007, Revised
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, June 6, 2007

Slow Down, Brave Multitasker, and Don’t Read This in Traffic
by Steve Lohr
The New York Times, March 25, 2007

43 Folders

10 Tips for Time Management in a Multitasking World
by Penelope Trunk
Brazen Careerist blog, Dec. 10, 2006