Chances are you check your e-mail while chatting on the phone, maybe sipping a cup of coffee and scribbling items on your to-do list while you're at it. That would put you firmly in the camp of most Americans, who regularly multitask--and assume that technique allows them get more done in less time. As it turns out, nothing could be further from the truth. Recent research shows that not only does multitasking not save time, it actually hinders your ability to operate efficiently. Chief among the evidence, a study from Stanford University revealed that the brains of people who regularly attempt to do multiple tech-oriented tasks at once--such as e-mailing, IM-ing, watching TV and browsing the Internet--pay a high price. Researchers put 100 students through a series of three tests and found that those who identified themselves as multitaskers were less able to pay attention, had worse memories and switched tasks with more difficulty compared with students who multitasked infrequently.
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The concept that the brain can only truly process one stream of information at a time isn't new to scientists. "Any time you do a task--whether it's visual, auditory or otherwise--it draws on a specific set of cognitive operations. The more tasks you perform, the more you draw from that limited pool of resources. At least one, and typically several, of the things you're attempting to do will suffer. It comes down to a resource deficit," explains Charles Folk, Ph.D., director of Villanova University's Cognitive Science Program.
It makes sense that you'd sacrifice some degree of quality for quantity. But what's less obvious is the amount of time lost due to multitasking, says Folk. "People think that they can switch back and forth between tasks every few minutes, or even every few seconds, without consequences. But research shows us that it takes the brain time to get reoriented. Even if you jump right into the next project, you're not going to immediately get in the swing of things, so to speak."
The truth is, "multitasking is really an act of procrastination," points out time management expert Laura Stack, author of Leave the Office Earlier. "It's essentially a bad habit. People hope that whatever they're distracting themselves with--an e-mail, an IM message, etc.--will be more interesting than what they're currently doing."
Some people are able to get better at multitasking over time, says neuroscientist and psychologist Michael Silverman, Ph.D., codirector of the Division of Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. "For example, teens and young adults are often so accustomed to doing 13 different things at once that they're better able to perform those tasks than someone twice their age, who has less experience operating that way." (Interestingly, Silverman says that some research suggests that the more intelligent you are, the more difficult it is to become a good multitasker; smart people seem inherently prone to focus on one thing at a time.)
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