What do all the multitaskers think? And the rest?
Natalia
*MULTITASKING WORSE ON IQ THAN POT
*
*ELIZABETH T B JOHNSTON, IEEE POTENTIALS* /(publication of the Institute
of Electrical and Electronics)/
- You may think that what you are doing is "multitasking", but really
your brain can only make one decision at a time. A good multi-tasker is
really just switching back and forth. . . A study carried out at the
British Institute of Psychiatry . . . found that excessive use of
technology reduced workers' intelligence and that those distracted by
incoming e-mail and phone calls saw a ten-point fall in their IQ, over
twice the impact of smoking or marijuana use. . .
Programmers [for example ] know that task switches take a long time. It
is easier to keep going once you're at full steam . . . than to stop
work and finish later. That last hour might take three hours, since you
have to retrieve all of the background info from long-term memory and
bring it back to the front of your mind.
Studies report that the American worker wastes 2.1 hours per day due to
multitasking. When distracted while performing a task, it takes a
certain amount of time to begin the new task, complete the new task and
get back on track with the original task. Microsoft employees had their
computers log their work for a period and found that simply dealing with
an e-mail message took an average of 15 minutes and often lead to
subsequent distractions, which lead to the employee taking up to an hour
to get back to their original task.
The bottom line is that multitasking has been proven to make us less
effective, not more. Although our digital assistants can be time savers,
they can also be time wasters, if we allow them to break our focus. So
for all of you who trouble getting things done . . . turn off your
chat, RSS feeds, Google Desktop, Outlook alerts and whatever else keeps
distracting you, and see what it would it would be like to simply focus
on [ the task at hand ].
*THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
*
---
avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean.
Virus Database (VPS): 080419-0, 04/19/2008
Tested on: 4/19/2008 12:49:21 PM
avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2008 ALWIL Software.
http://www.avast.com
_______________________________________________
Futurework mailing list
Futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca
http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
