UK loses 1 billion working days to multitasking

As the demands of technology and social media in the workplace multiply, multitasking is becoming a bigger part of UK employees’ jobs and could be costing companies one billion days in lost time, according to new research from global recruiter Randstad.

A poll of 2,025 British adults found that:
• Nine in 10 jobs involve multitasking
• Only 33% of workers have developed strategies to cope with the demands to multitask
• 74% of female respondents think women are better at multitasking then men, while only 5% of males think men are better.

45% of respondents said they have to deal with more multitasking at work than they did two or three years ago, compared to just 16% who said they deal with less.

The problem is that there’s a price to be paid for the growing number of interruptions employees face. According to a University of California-Irvine study, regaining our initial momentum following an interruption takes, on average, more than 20 minutes.

With 22.76 million people currently working full-time in the UK, working approximately 253 days a year, the country’s permanent work force is now losing more than one billion working days’ worth of productivity every year as a result of multitasking.