Multitasking Considered Detrimental

djvaselaar sends along an article from The New Atlantis that summarizes recent research indicating that multitasking may be detrimental to work and learning. It begins, "In one of the many letters he wrote to his son in the 1740s, Lord Chesterfield offered the following advice: 'There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.' To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one's time; it was a mark of intelligence... E-mails pouring in, cell phones ringing, televisions blaring, podcasts streaming--all this may become background noise, like the 'din of a foundry or factory' that [William] James observed workers could scarcely avoid at first, but which eventually became just another part of their daily routine. For the younger generation of multitaskers, the great electronic din is an expected part of everyday life. And given what neuroscience and anecdotal evidence have shown us, this state of constant intentional self-distraction could well be of profound detriment to individual and cultural well-being."

Comments

Re:Multitasking is easy!

[techmuse]

That's not multitasking: that's switching between tasks very slowly (unlike your processor which does it very fast). Multitasking is the equivalent of breathing and running (two or more things at the same time) - or having multiple processors in computer terms. Actually, what you are thinking of is multiprocessing, which is different from multitasking. Multitasking is switching back and forth between multiple tasks, each of which run for a fixed quantum before the next task switch occurs. Although this is typically done too fast to notice, the rate of task switching is not part of the definition of multitasking. Multiprocessing is the actual simultaneous execution of two tasks or threads, and is typically performed using distinct execution units, such as multiple processors, cores, or (as in the case of Intel's hyperthreading), subsets of pipelines.