Multitasking or divided attention is for computers, not people. A mountain of evidence says human beings can only do one thing at a time and do it well. I’m on the hunt for a job, and just about every job description I read requires the skill multitasking. We can check email while attending a staff meeting, but you’ll write crappy emails and miss much of what’s said in the meeting. Good luck coming up with intelligent-sounding answers if called upon.

We know from studies done in psychology and neuroscience that the human brain is excellent at processing things one at a time, in fact, it’s better at serial processing than anything else on the planet. We all have a time of day when our brains are at their best, for many of us, it’s in the morning, and if you start your day by reading and answering all your emails, you may have just used your most productive brain time on email. That time would be better spent on prioritizing your day. You can accomplish many things on the same day by creating a schedule and parting out your time and attention, starting with the things that are most important and require the most brain power first and prioritizing from there.

Neuroscience also tells us that our processing power decreases a bit every time we make a decision. Constant texting or emailing can reduce your IQ by an average of 10 points, according to David Rock in his book, ‘Your Brain At Work.’ A busy executive's last need is a 10-point decrease in IQ.

I just searched in the jobs section on www.craigslist.org for multitasking, and it returned more than 1000 results. Surely all these employers are not asking us to do work destined to be flawed, make us feel bad about ourselves, and decrease our job satisfaction. Maybe we need a new buzzword to replace multitasking.

So, HR and hiring managers, please stop using the word multitasking as a job requirement. You could say something like, “must be able to keep many balls in the air” or “must be able to make progress on several tasks in a day.” When you ask for multitasking, you're asking for employees to do a crappy job on several things simultaneously and then feel inadequate. I know that’s not what you want. Just say no to multitasking!