You make less progress trying to complete multiple financial goals simultaneously. If you’re multitasking while trying to accomplish a significant financial goal like paying down debt, saving for an emergency fund or increasing investments, you’ll be slower to complete it and you might be less successful.
Despite being told that multitasking is the key to success, in actuality humans are really best suited to accomplish goals as “monotaskers.” In fact, a 2010 Psychonomic Bulletin & Review study found that just 2.5% of people are able to multitask effectively.
This means that our brains can only focus on one task at a time, argued neuropsychologist Cynthia Kubu in a 2021 interview with the Cleveland Clinic. In actuality, no one is really multitasking — instead you are likely switching between multiple tasks in really rapid succession. As the University of Southern California’s program in applied psychology explains, you’re more prone to making mistakes, overlooking important details and slowing down your overall progress.
I can’t say I’ve completely kicked the multitasking habits I was raised to believe would make me successful. But I can confirm that slowing down and reducing the number of financial tasks I have to manage on a daily and monthly basis has significantly boosted my financial progress. For example, I now:
Keep all of my financial accounts in one net worth tracker and watch them as a total picture, versus individual accounts.
Stick to dollar-cost averaging into my retirement accounts instead of trying to keep up with the latest investment news.
Put all my basic expenses on auto-draft and pay for as many bills as I can in advance such as insurance to reduce the number of bills I have to attend to each month.
Reducing my task load during monthly budgeting meetings with my husband helped us pay off $300,000 of student loan and mortgage debt in three years versus my previous financial advisor’s projection that it would take decades.
Struggling To Remember Critical Concepts That Are Foundations For Better Financial Choices
One of the biggest forms of multitasking money goals I witness as a financial educator are people consuming too much information across too many media channels to become more financially literate. However, when it’s time to deploy the attained knowledge, learners often report that they’ve heard of concepts like a Roth IRA, or rules to know when buying your first home, but they rarely remember the important details.
It turns out that it’s not their imagination. A decade’s worth of research by Stanford psychology professor Anthony Wagner has shown that people who frequently use many types of media at once performed significantly worse on simple memory tasks.
In my own real-life example, I often like to watch the latest financial trends on YouTube, while also finishing up work emails, and then switching over to my phone if I see a notification pop up on my Instagram account. Not only will I need to watch the YouTube video over again because I can’t remember anything that was said, but I will also forget where I put down my glass of water or eyeglasses along the way.
I also find that when trying to learn financial strategies across multiple media channels, learners then get so overwhelmed with information overload and conflicting opinions that they end up executing nothing at all.
What You Can Do To Kick The Multitasking Urge
To combat this urge to multitask across multiple forms of media, especially while learning new financial concepts, you can:
Choose one platform as your preferred financial education medium.
Set a timer for 30 minutes to complete your financial learning and turn off all phone and email notifications in that time frame.
Pick a particular topic that’s relevant to you now, so that you’re more likely to apply it and therefore remember it.
The most effective strategy I can recommend is recruiting an accountability partner who will also commit to financial education. You’ll learn side by side with someone else, reducing your temptation to switch to other things on your to-do list. My husband and I personally allocate an hour the first Sunday of every month to sit down and review our financial goals together.
We also divide tasks, which helps us complete multiple things at the same time while each of us focuses on what we do best. For example, he is often in charge of booking travel arrangements, while I may be in charge of researching what our investments should look like for that month.
You’ll also get the added motivation boost of knowing you’re not going at money goals alone. You can root for each other when you finish what you started.
