VDoing many things at the same time is part of everyday work for some people. “With the new media, there is a great temptation to constantly work on different channels,” says Thomas Rigotti, Professor of Work, Organizational and Business Psychology at the University of Mainz. “But too much of it can overload our brain, impair performance and possibly make us ill.” The introduction of new software has offered more and more opportunities for multitasking, says Dorothea Engel, who has worked as a lawyer in an international IT company for 22 years. “Fortunately, I don’t feel compelled to do that. But you have to be careful that the positive outweighs the negative and that it doesn’t become an annoying habit.”
The term multitask is said to have first appeared in an IBM publication in 1965. It referred to the ability of the operating system of the time to run multiple processes at the same time. Today, multitasking is commonly understood to mean doing two or more tasks at the same time. However, due to the function of our brain, this is only very rarely possible, says Rigotti. “Most of the time you work on tasks in rapid succession and it only seems like you’re doing them simultaneously.”