Last week we talked about how your audience experiences you. Well, our audience experienced not such a great side of us because the person that does the weekly email tips (aka Michelle) was multi-tasking and made several mistakes. So, we thought we would share some of the bad things that happen when you multi-task.

Multi-tasking is bad for several reasons. First, it gets us into trouble because we are not paying attention. A few examples are of course my misspellings last week in the email. Other common mistakes are sending emails to the wrong person or replying to one party or all when you are not supposed to. Apparently I am on a roll since I also sent an email to the wrong person within the last 30 days. What about that proposal that you sent that had spelling mistakes, the wrong features or pricing or even worse the wrong company name? Does that sound painfully familiar?

Research shows that while multi-tasking makes us feel good, it is really bad for us beyond just the misspellings. Multi-tasking significantly lowers our retention rate which I can attest to. I have watched webinars that weren't super interesting and then worked on emails and basically came away with nothing from the webinar that stuck.

The good news is that in our post Tales From the Dark Side of Multi-tasking, we also give you some tips on how to prevent multi-tasking and more. Nine of the tips are solely based on writing which seems to give most people (that didn't graduate with an English or literature major) the biggest problems.