Multitasking: The Enemy of Productivity

NEW YORK (MainStreet) -- With March Madness about to start, college basketball aficionados -- otherwise known as your employees -- will be hovering over their carefully chosen brackets, scouring social media sites for player information and watching the occasional afternoon game through their work computer.

As the business owner and manager of those workers, your job is to make sure they still get their jobs done and that events such as March Madness don't get in the way of your company's output. But how do you do that when iPhones are everywhere and workers have essentially become multitasking agents -- combining work and personal lives at (theoretically) all times of the day?

March Madness is a great time to if whether workers are doing what they're supposed to -- and how to fix it if not.

Jonathan Spira is the CEO and chief analyst of Basex, a research firm focusing on workplace and productivity issues faced by companies in the so-called knowledge economy and the author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous to Your Organization. He shared his knowledge of how to fix an unproductive workplace:

What are detractors to employee productivity?

Spira: We have a lot of trouble paying attention. We have developed into a workforce with very short attention spans, and that tends to be a problem because keeping a focus on something without self-interrupting is difficult. Self-interrupting counts just as much as you interrupting Bob or Susan. We also evolved into a society that is predicated on instant gratification. We also tend to get a huge amount of information in tiny, little nuggets. And studies have shown this barrage of information basically lessens our ability to absorb deeper and greater thoughts.