Crave - CNET: "If you can't read through this article in one sitting, you may be in serious trouble. The good news is you wouldn't discover what your problem is. Are you still reading?
It has been my presumption that multitaskers are generally more productive than people who prefer to do one thing at a time. Typical examples of those with what I call 'occupational short attention span' tend to be workers in high-tech environments, including me and most of my CNET co-workers."
6 comments:
The first thing I realize when reading this article is that I am guilty of exactly what it talks about- habitual multitasking. However, I think that rather than it being less productive, it is the only way to BE productive in today's electronically connected society. In order to stay abreast with the developments you are expected to, you have to constantly watch news feeds. And rather than phone calls or in person conversations, during which it is harder to multitask, much important information comes via e-mail. If you don't multitask to constantly check your e-mail, you could easily miss important things! (canceled classes, swine flu outbreaks, etc.)
Ok, enough on the rant of multitasking. The real point here- we need to look at HOW we are multitasking, as it should now be accepted that most of us habitually do it.
had always been told that females have a stronger mental compacity for multi-tasking then males so I was surprised they did not dive deeper into sex, or even age. With our generation's technology overload that multi-tasking has become the norm. However, I wonder if multi-tasking has increased cases of ADD or merely multi-tasking is simply a side effect of a form of ADD. It's one thing to listen to music as you write the paper if you are still able to complete the task in the time you've allotted yourself and quite another to write a section, listen to a song, and then maybe even jump to whatever is being said on the TV. I just wonder where the line is drawn between multi-tasking and ADD and if multi-tasking is merely the new term for mild ADD.
I tend to be quite the multi-tasker, and generally pride myself on how much I can do at once, but I very much understand how it can be a setback. I've been moving from one thing on my to-do list to another for the better part of the afternoon without completing the first, and instead of it being helpful, I'm just becoming distracted.
When it comes to how you multi-task it seems that the key is in what size a slice of time you consider to be uninterruptible. For some they'll only lock in for a few seconds, then look for the next stimulus. If instead you can say that you'll check the voice mail, email, instant messages, etc. every 5 (or 20, or 15, or 30, etc.) minutes or sooner if the current task is finished first then a lot less time is lost switching tasks.
While I am definitely guilty of the some of the things in this article, not-multi-tasking becomes increasingly difficult in a world where we are consistently connected, the need to be constantly connected increases. There is the feeling that if you do not check your email consistently, as Brian said, you will miss the most recent swine-flu outbreak. However, there are some tasks where multi-tasking just is not viable, and knowing when focus must be put on a single task is imperative.
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