One thing is as certain as death and taxes – each year we seem to get better at multi-tasking – or at least we think we do. We so many distractions it’s a skill we must master – or is it?
Wait! Multitasking, that bulwark of anemic résumés everywhere, has come under fire in recent years. And it should, it’s making us all crazy. Some high points from a recent NYT article.
A 2014 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that interruptions as brief as two to three seconds — which is to say, less than the amount of time it would take you to toggle from this article to your email and back again — were enough to double the number of errors participants made in an assigned task.
As much as people would like to believe otherwise, humans have finite neural resources that are depleted every time we switch between tasks, which, especially for those who work online, one researcher said, can happen upward of 400 times a day, according to a 2016 University of California Irvine study. “That’s why you feel tired at the end of the day,” she said. “You’ve used them all up.”
