Many people multi-task in business however some of the downsides of multi-tasking are distraction from the important work, lost focus and reduced productivity.
Changing from one task to another is like shifting gears in a car except multi-tasking is doing it in your brain.
Psychological studies show that shifting from one task to another involves a time and performance hit. And the more complex the task or your lack of familiarity with the task, the greater the performance hit. Even when successive tasks are familiar and the rules to complete the task are simple, there is still a hit in productivity.
 A study by the University of Illinois and Microsoft found that a worker interrupted by answering an email takes on average 17 minutes to get back to what they were doing.
Increasing the complexity and unknown of new tasks and the ability of people to switch seemslessly between tasks decreases at an alarming rate.
So while multi-tasking may seem more efficient it is anything but for the majority of people.
In Ezidoesit Enterprise Edition the EziAnswer option allows you to drag emails that have to be answered to the white colour on the Elevator Bar and then answer them at your covenience. This avoids constant interruptions which leads to lower productivity.
However sometimes it is very hard to avoid a certain amount of multi-tasking at work. Ezidoesit can help to minimize these issues through the following features -
= Quicker and smarter scheduling of work tasks into your Outlook Calendar, non important emails archived out of the inbox using the Ezidoesit Email Archiving option and EziAnswer to deal with emails requiring an answer.
= Easier ways to re-schedule incomplete tasks - if you do not finish a task today drag it to tomorrow or use the Auto Re-Schedule option in the Enterprise Edition.
= Because you work from the schedule of tasks and appointments in your Outlook Calendar rather than your Outlook Inbox there is a decreased possibility of being distracted by incoming email.
= Once you have scheduled Ezidoesit tasks into the Outlook Calendar you can bring up the calendar view in Outlook and look at the big picture, what you have to work on today, this week or this month if you plan that far in advance. The Ezidoesit tasks display in the colour of their priority - red, orange, yellow and green (in Outlook 2007).
You can now drag tasks to different days or times, enlarge or minimize the size of the task to increase or reduce the task duration time. Because Ezidoesit tasks are dynamic and automatically linked to the Outlook Calendar, when you do this the individual task information is changed and updated automatically. |