School is back in session. As the kids pour back into the schools, you'll see lots of new backpacks, fresh notebooks, lots of pens and pencils ... and cell phones. That's right. Check out the kids walking into school. Many of them have their faces hunched over a phone texting someone else on the other side of the building.
Cell phones have made many aspects of parenting easier. Parents no longer have to worry about where their kids have gone after school. They do not have to rely on their kids to remember to leave a note when going to a friend's house. They can alert a child that traffic has delayed them on their way to pick them up from baseball practice.
But cell phones are also one of the biggest sources of multitasking. Add to that portable video games and instant messaging, and you have a host of distractions. And this is just as true for the adult world as it is for the child's world.
How do people multitask?
There are certain things that people are able to do simultaneously. We really can walk and chew gum at the same time. Most of the time, though, when we can do two things at once, it is because one or both of those things are highly overlearned habits that don't require you to monitor how well you're doing.
A kid at school, though, is there to learn new things. (And for that matter, people at their desks at work are supposed to be focused on doing something important.) When you are learning something new, then you need to be focused on that material. If you try to do two things at once, then you end up switching back and forth between them. A few seconds of learning, a few seconds of texting, then a few more seconds of learning.
That switching back and forth makes you bad at both tasks.
Plus, there is a switching cost. It takes a bit of time for you to change your mindset when you change tasks. So, when you try to multitask, not only do you make each task less effective, you also make it slower.
Most of us, though, think we're above average multitaskers. We believe that other people might suffer, but we're actually pretty good at it. Unfortunately, multitasking also impairs the areas of the brain that you use to monitor your own performance. So, you're just not the best judge of your own multitasking ability.
The cell phone is a particular problem, because it provides a constant distraction. You never know when the next text message or email may come in. So, you tend to develop a habit to check your phone regularly. That habit starts to prey at you during the day. A kid in school who has gotten used to checking text messages regularly will frequently start wondering whether a new message has come in, which will be a distraction from school.
Ultimately, it is a good idea to put your cell phone away for the day at school or at work. Shut it off and leave it off until you are on a break or at lunch. Get in the habit of checking your texts and emails only a few times a day rather than all the time. All of this helps you to stay focused.
Follow Art Markman, Ph.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/abmarkman
Dr. Jon LaPook: Is Technological Multitasking Ruining Our Communication?
Shira Hirschman Weiss: Secrets of the Multitasking Mom
Dr. Jim Taylor: Multitasking is Out, Single Tasking is In
Margaret Heffernan: Why Multitasking Makes Us Stupid
Bad At Multitasking? Blame Your Brain : NPR
Drop that BlackBerry! Multitasking may be harmful - CNN
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I am scowled at all the time because I can't prepare dinner and talk to my wife at the same time. Most men I know also claim they can only do one thing at once, but our generation did not grow up with cell phones.
In addition, we tend to notice people who succeed at something that we're not good at.
Finally (as an aside) for most right handers (men and women) much of the structural part of language is in the left hemisphere of the brain. I think the jury is still out on exactly what it means to have a thicker corpus callosum.
I've noticed that women can jump from subject to subject in conversation without losing the thread, while I and other men want to finish one conversation before starting another. Is that because women are more experienced talkers, or is some other factor at play?
Perhaps one can trace this difference in ways of conversation to the hunter-gatherer past, when men needed to hunt silently to avoid scaring away prey and women gathered more noisily to scare off predators?
After my three year old daughter was nearly run down by a texting driver in 2009, I invented an app to manage texting whether the user is at home, in the office or on the road. OTTER (One Touch Text Response) has GPS road safety features and a silent texting Auto Reply with a timer and unlimited, grouped, customizable responses. Its simple and easy to schedule "texting blackout periods" so you can focus on the task at hand, like an important meeting - or anything like... watching a movie ot paying attention in class. Maybe technology can help us get back to doing one thing at a time with quality results.
Erik Wood, owner
OTTER LLC
OTTER app
Good point. I am working diligently to stop use of cell phones of my staff during the work day other than scheduled breaks. They are too distracted with their cell phones and not paying attention to their tasks. Family calls? Try using the land lines and call Mom only when necessary.
Don't get me wrong - I love my smart phone - it astounds me what I can do with this gadget but I just hope none of these guys ever attempts to be in a relationship with a human that you could actually touch.
I think that people keep hoping that if they try it enough, then multitasking will become second nature. We are just a lot more efficient doing one thing at a time. And the more complex the thing we're trying to do or learn, the less efficient we get.
...what? Maybe in some cases, but you clearly haven't played enough video games. There are countless games where you have to focus on multiple things at the same time. Video games have definitely become far easier and dumbed-down in general in the last decade or two, though, because doing this vastly increases the size of the market. Games of the past were often unbeatable by the average player -- now it's almost a given that you'll eventually finish any given game if you try long enough.
Much of it is simply the way that some peoples' brains work, but certain activities like some types of video games can surely help develop these skills.