Multitasking is making you bad at your job. Here are 4 ways to fix that.

The Chicago Tribune reports:

We all do it. Send off a text while in a meeting. Respond to an email while finishing a report. But to be truly productive, we have to find a way to keep the urge to multitask at bay.

Research shows that people who regularly use more than one media device — like watching television while working on your laptop — show poor attention in the face of distractions and have decreased grey matter in the region associated with error-checking.

In "The Leading Brain: Powerful Science-Based-Strategies for Achieving Peak Performance," neuropsychologist Friederike Fabritius and leadership expert Hans W. Hagemann give a litany of examples of why doing too many things at once makes you bad at your job.

For starters, people who are interrupted take about 50 percent longer to complete their task — and that task contains about 50 percent more errors.

Time.