“You might think a lot gets done when you multitask, however a study conducted by Stanford researchers Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass and Anthony Wagner says it isn’t so.”
“People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found.” (from Adam Gorlick)
From a BNET report:
Filtering out irrelevant details: Researchers asked participants to ignore certain pieces of data. The non-jugglers had no problem following this instruction, while the multitaskers could not filter out this information and, as a result, performed poorly.
Remembering information: An experiment asking people to remember a sequence of letters, Ophir said in a Stanford press release, “The low multitaskers did great. The high multitaskers were doing worse and worse the further they went along because they kept seeing more letters and had difficulty keeping them sorted in their brains.”
Switching between tasks: Though this is what multitasking is all about, those who do so regularly have trouble focusing on the purpose and information associated with each discreet undertaking. Said Ophir, “They couldn’t help thinking about the task they weren’t doing. They can’t keep things separate in their minds.”
Way back quote: In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.” end quote (The New Atlantis Journal)
If you are bedeviled by a Blackberry, masses of irrelevant email and a boss that thinks you should be multitasking, its time to take your life back. Lets be honest you may look impressive in the short term or hip or up to date, cool, “with it”… or what ever the apt description is today, connected perhaps, however that’s just “FORM”. What employers need from you is “SUBSTANCE” or competence if you prefer. So its time to rethink your attitude and work style before your productivity and value to the organization (or lack of it) makes you uneconomic and redundant. Not only that, if the research is correct, you may just save yourself from becoming an unemployable total scatterbrain.
Remember if you need to deal with the boss on this issue you can refer him or her to this post or directly to the research itself. You could I suppose based on the BBC statement go only half way in destroying your IQ and just sit back and relax with a “joint”… not recommended! I wonder if there are any dope smoking multitaskers… what would they work like… come to think of it I think I’ve met a few at work.
Ric (orglearn) *Link for direct page viewers return to main career success blog to check out other posts by Ric of www.orglearn.org!
