Are you doing too much at once?Are you doing too much at once?

A Stanford University study says multi-taskers are not exactly optimised: they are likely to end up as scattered people with no mastery over any skill

I almost made a massive blooper while multi-tasking recently.

A few months ago, I was trying to wrap up my IT ADDA story, mail it to the features editor, and send out the mobile alert for Bangalore at the same time. Naturally, I had several windows open on my desktop. I clicked on one, pressed Ctrl-C, hit Alt-Tab and pressed Ctrl-V. My aim was to post the IT ADDA story into Outlook and send it to my boss.

Unfortunately, in my hurry, I pasted a 500 word story into the site we use for the mobile alerts. Fortunately for me, the site screamed in red something along the lines of '2004 characters of 160 entered. Some information will be lost, please revise your entry'. I immediately realised my error and never published the message had I done so, I probably would have been handed the sack!



Concentrate

Multi-tasking is getting very common these days, and people are getting used to browsing through a paper, checking out a Web site, and reading an SMS at the same time. Many of us believe that we are becoming more and more efficient as we do this, but a study published by Stanford has a different story to tell.

To find out the effects of multi-tasking, Stanford put about 100 students through a series of three tests to gauge performance. Instead of boring you with details of these tests, let us just quote what Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers said on news.stanford.edu: They're suckers for irrelevancy. Everything distracts them.

What was that again?

Eyal Ophir, who was the study's lead author, also has similar thoughts to share. "We kept looking for what they're better at, and we didn't find it."

So, do chronic media multi-taskers lack the ability to concentrate? Or are they taking on too much and thereby losing control? This is a question that the researchers are trying to answer.

Computer problem

At one level, computers also strain us a lot. In the good old days of DOS, you ran just one program at a time.

With the advent of Windows, you could open several applications at once, which was good up to a point.

But over a period of time, people have started doing too much with their PCs all at once, which is detrimental to concentration, and therefore, ultimately, to productivity.

So, should we just single-task? Should we let computers do the multi-tasking? It would be so nice to do one thing at a time and then move on to another task once the first one is completed, but rarely are we given such privileges these days!

QUICK TAKE
>>Many of us are forced to multi-task
>>But researchers say this is inefficient
>>Unfortunately, it is hard to correct the problem

Research notes
Since the 1990s, experimental psychologists have started experiments on the nature and limits of human multitasking. It has been proven multitasking is not as workable as concentrated times. In general, these studies have disclosed that people show severe interference when even very simple tasks are performed at the same time, if both tasks require selecting and producing action. Many researchers believe that action planning represents a bottleneck, which the human brain can only perform one task at a time.
Source: Wikipedia