Article by: Jennifer Kohn
I don’t like to multitask. It’s true. I don’t talk on the phone in the car. I keep
my instant messenger off while at work. Sometimes I even turn off my email (gasp!)
while I’m working on a project and need to concentrate. I don’t even like to listen
to music while I work. I like it quiet. Around me is a sea of multitaskers. They
obsessively check email and text messages on their mobile devices while otherwise
engaged. They talk on the phone while driving and sipping a morning coffee. On phone
conferences, I hear the tell tale signs of the keyboard keys and know they are listening
with one ear.
Now, I can multitask a little bit; mostly with my children. Cook dinner while carrying
my 18-month old, disciplining the three year old, and spelling out “b” words for
the 4 ½ year old. It’s chaotic, and dinner is whatever I can make with one hand.
We eat a lot of stir fry.
Conventional wisdom says this is the way things are done now. People can do more
in 24 hours than ever before—except for me. But thanks to the new study out of
Stanford, I feel almost righteous in my aversion to multitasking. I am not
a “sucker for irrelevancy”—my favorite and most repeated sound bite from communication
professor Clifford Nass, one
of the researchers whose findings are published in the Aug. 24 edition of the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences.
Turns out multitasking isn’t so good for you. Check this out from the Stanford University
release about the study: “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.”
There’s one area where all of my professional colleagues agree we shouldn’t multitask,
and that’s in the tutoring we offer. Our tutors always work with one student—giving
him/her their undivided attention for as long as they are working together on a
question or problem. No multitasking allowed. Students stay engaged too, working
closely with the tutor until they finish the task at hand.
The students who took part in the Stanford university study were assigned tasks
to test their memory and cognition, like spotting duplicates in a long string of
alphabetical letters. That may not sound like your nightly math homework, but the
researchers' conclusion applies to you too: "In situations where there are multiple
sources of information coming from the external world or emerging out of memory,"
they wrote, students are "not able to filter out what's not relevant to their current
goal." So the next time you're finishing a math problem, writing an essay, or studying
for a test, remember—no texting, no phone calls, and no surfing. Don’t be a sucker.
Jennifer Kohn is the Vice President for Corporate Communications at Tutor.com.