Sleep. Relaxation. These words are like the most beautiful sounds to many people.

As for me, however, I am in love with multi-tasking.

I can't be productive at all if I don't keep myself busy. With lots of free time throughout the day, I don't feel motivated at all to do what I need or even want to do. It's like the pressure of having a lot of things to do puts enough pressure on me to force me to get things done. And oftentimes I do more than one of these things at one time: talking while driving, eating while reading, and so on.

However, a study by Joshua Rubinstein, Ph.D., of the Federal Aviation Administration, and David Meyer, Ph.D., and Jeffrey Evans, Ph.D., of the University of Michigan found that multi-tasking can actually be more inefficient.

People use their "executive control" processes - the mental CEO - when they are multi-tasking. These processes are associated with the prefrontal cortex and other neural regions in the brain and help prioritize activities within the mind.

Executive control involves two different but complementary stages: goal shifting ("I want to do this now instead of that") and rule activation ("I'm turning off the rules for that and turning on the rules for this"). Both stages help people unconsciously switch between tasks.

Moving between different tasks can mean losing time in between the activities, and the extra time can add up fast. The time between, rule activation, can take several tenths of a second or longer if between unrelated tasks. Time costs increase with the complexity of the tasks, so it takes much longer to switch between more complex tasks. If the person knows a task better and are more familiar with it, however, they work faster.

Thus, multitasking may seem more efficient on the surface, but may actually take more time in the end. Whoops.

So be careful to dedicate the right amounts of time to certain tasks.