Most people are sure that doing several tasks at once and constantly being online is beneficial for their work productivity. However, that’s not the case. Unfortunately, chats and social networks distract us. Nowadays, in a digitalized world, people spend approximately 60-65% of their working time messaging or searching the internet. Employees feel more tired with every following year. Why does it happen?

In 2009, Sophie Leroy, an experienced business professor at the University of Minnesota (USA), decided to study this issue. She held an experiment. She divided people into two groups, both of which had to hire employees. The first group had to complete the entire task before moving to the next one. The second group had to switch activities in the middle of the action. As a result, the second group was much less productive despite the feeling of doing more. Also, the second group accepted much worse employees than expected.

This phenomenon can be explained by dividing all the work into deep and shallow. Deep work is a time when you do not spread your attention to many things, focusing on your main goal. This work type helps you improve your skills and work quality, requiring the maximum concentration of attention. Shallow work is an activity type when you can easily get distracted: checking the inbox, team calling, etc. It does not involve any special skills. When we pay attention to too many things at once, we make all our work shallow, not letting ourselves finish the task faster and learn something new.