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Once you've been part of the Canadian workforce for about five minutes, you'll have already heard about multitasking and that it's a wonderful skill that lets you do many things at one time and be more productive. However, the truth is that science has told us differently, with multitasking shown to be a productivity killer instead. As a prospective or current Canadian franchisee, you should focus on getting into the monotasking habit instead, and the same applies to your staff.
The downsides of too many things at once
In a nutshell, multiple studies have shown that multitasking can actually harm your brain, reduce your attention span, interfere with your memory, increase your stress levels and decrease your efficiency and productivity. None of these effects are good, but that last one is an absolute killer for franchisees and their staff.
Change your company culture
Whether you have employees right now or not, it's worth remembering that making monotasking the new normal down the road will rely on your lead. This means behaving how you want other people to behave. When you're in a meeting, put your phone away so you can fully focus on the speaker. Resist the urge to stop a meeting to do something else, take a call or reply to a text.
One reason multitasking becomes the norm in a business to begin with is that people just don't feel as if they have the time they need to do everything, so they try to do many things at once to compensate. You and your staff need to create time blocks for tasks to use time more efficiently so you don't feel as if you're racing against the clock all the time. Staff blocks will likely be hourly over the course of a day. As a franchise business owner, you can assign different tasks to various days for yourself, such as choosing one day for maintenance, one day for administrative work, and one day for marketing.
Keep in mind that when you monotask, you're not just doing one task over an entire shift. It simply means that when you start one task, you give that job your full attention until it's finished, and then you can move onto the next item on your list. Once you've got it down, you should find that you're actually move productive over the course of a day than you were before.
