With the prevalence of social media and the openness to distractions that our fully-mobile always-connected world has now stepped into, multitasking is no longer the rare occurrence it used to be many years ago.
Does your multitasking day begin in the office? If only. How many of you have considered how much of your early morning you could ‘optimize’ by combining activities? Shower and brush your teeth, have breakfast, catch up on traffic news while reading the paper and drinking coffee, briefly stopping to check your calendar on your BlackBerry while responding to an email that just came to your attention because your phone chimed in with that custom ringtone you paid $1.50 for. It’s a wonder we are all not insane.
And the question is why? Why do we do it?? Why do I do it and why do YOU do it? Easy answer you say. “It make me more productive”. “I get more done”. Do you? Do you really? Honestly?
Stanford University asked this question, and the answers do not bode well us dear multitasker, not well at all.
3 key findings stood out
- Multitaskers were poor at ignoring irrelevant information. They did significantly worse at tests that required them to pay attention to one thing, and were more likely to be distracted by trivial and useless information than others who multitasked less.
- They were worse at task switching. Now this was a revelation of almost Biblical proportions. I thought multitaskers got GOOD at this! You know? Slick! Flirting like Mohammed Ali's gloved fists from one task to another, knocking each one out... no? News flash, it’s the opposite! People more given to working of few tasks at a time move between tasks more easily than their dual-core multiprocessing brethren.
- Lastly and I think most importantly is the issue of ‘performance’. Multitaskers were shown to attain a sub-par level of competency with whatever it was that they were passionately involved in. The more social-services they used, the less adept they were at the usage of them on an individual basis. In fact, totally proving the old adage true, they were jacks of all-trades and masters of none.
So the next time you think you could be doing more with your time? Packing more into your already-insane schedule? Take a breather an maybe consider yourself fortunate that you aren’t… You've probably made a mess of enough things already.
Further reading
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