Not a week goes by that one of my coaching clients doesn’t list one of their leadership strengths as “great at multi-tasking”. When we delineate the other side of the leadership equation-weaknesses, frequently, “poor listening”, “lack of focus” and “inattention to detail” show up. This is the flip side of the multi-tasking coin. An operational definition of multi-tasking might be-“rapidly shifting focus from one task to another, sometimes in random fashion, resulting in a fade-in and fade out effect that is so blurry that none of the tasks are actually achieved or conversations attended to”. Take a look at some of the staggering ramifications of multi-tasking.

In the New York Times, May 4, 2013–“A focus on Distraction post Typography” Bob Sullivan and Hugh Thompson report on research by Gloria Marks of University of California Irvine. She found that a typical office worker gets 11 minutes between each interruption and that it takes 25 minutes to return to an original task after an interruption. The authors asked Alessandro Acquite at Carnegie Mellon to design an experiment to measure brain drain when the brain is interrupted. In this experiment subjects read a short passage and answered questions about it. There were three groups of subjects, each undergoing two rounds of testing:

• Group one: Read the passage. Answered the questions each round.
• Group two: Told they might be contacted for further instructions during the reading. Read the passage. Interrupted the first time. Was not interrupted on the second round.
• Group three: Told they might be contacted for further instructions. Read the passage. Interrupted both rounds.

Both interrupted groups scored 20% lower than members of the non-interrupted groups on the first round of testing. In the second round of interruptions, the third group scored only 14% lower than the non-interrupted group- indicating that they had learned to adapt to the interruption. The kicker finding however was that in group 2-those who had been interrupted the first time, prepared for it a second time and were not interrupted the second time- their score increased by 44%-suggesting that these subjects were able to adapt to the concept of interruption as a deadline and thus focus better when they were not interrupted.

As David Rock, CEO of the Neuroleadership Institute, told Fortune on Feb 20, 2013- “Another ingredient of the “Healthy Mind Platter” is focus time. This is when we focus intensely on a single task, making deeper connections across the brain. Focus time is important for long-term memory as well as overall brain health. We need to design workspaces where people can focus, totally undisturbed, for blocks of time as needed.

My research shows that people have one to two peak performing hours a day at best. What if those hours involve being bombarded with constant distractions? As well as having fewer insights and not being able to go deeply into an idea, the task switching exhausts our brains”.

The evidence is solid. Multi-tasking impairs your ability to learn new information. Details, information and meaningful connections become lost in the shuffle. From a coaching perspective the questions for you to consider are:

• “What does multi-tasking cost you?”
• “On a scale of 1-10 (0 being not at all important), how important is it for you to find an hour a day for uninterrupted thinking, learning and reading?”
• “Why not a LOWER number?”
• “How will you find and protect that hour?”
• “What does paying attention look like?”
• “How will you cultivate the art of paying attention, including listening more deeply?”
• “How will you know if you are successful?”