Multitasking

The Myth Of Multitasking – NPR

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The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They’re basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking.

 

So we have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people that rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted.

 

They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand. And even – they’re even terrible at multitasking. When we ask them to multitask, they’re actually worse at it. So they’re pretty much mental wrecks.

via The Myth Of Multitasking : NPR.

For your reading pleasure I’ve offered up just a few quotes from the transcript of a wonderful interview with Clifford Nass, author of “The Man Who Lied to His Laptop,” professor of communications at Stanford University.  Listen to the entire interview.  It is well worth your time.

‘Mindfulness’ Is Being Incorporated Into Employer Strategies to Combat Multitasking

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“Studies show that about 49 percent of our waking time, our minds have wandered away from the task at hand,” Bahl says. “Especially with digital communication, there’s a lot of texting, there’s a lot of multitasking going on, and people are losing the ability to focus when they really want to focus.”

This isn’t just harmless woolgathering. According to data from Basex, a Yorktown Heights, New York-based business research firm, the estimated annual cost to the U.S. economy in loss of productivity from multitasking is $997 billion and a minimum of 28 billion hours.

via ‘Mindfulness’ Is Being Incorporated Into Employer Strategies to Combat Multitasking – Featured Article – Workforce.