Multitasking is bad!

I have just came across a very interesting article on Clickz (Is Social Media Multitasking Worse Than Marijuana?) about multitasking. I believe many of us feel that to perform well in the work environment we NEED to multitask and I too believed so. However, after reading the article, which was cited with a few different researches, I am convinced that multitasking will reduce our quality of work. In a nutshell, the article states that multitasking is an interruption on the thought process and thus reducing our IQ on the tasks and can also have a negative impact on our health!

And I thought I’m getting old….

Below is an excerpt of the article

According to Josh Waitzkin, “A study at The British Institute of Psychiatry showed that checking your email while performing another creative task decreases your IQ in the moment 10 points. That is the equivalent of not sleeping for 36 hours – more than twice the impact of smoking marijuana.”

Many of us falsely believe that multitasking is helping us be more efficient, but in fact, if done improperly, it may have the opposite effect. Folding laundry while listening to a podcast is efficient; tweeting while taking a business call is not. How often are you interrupted each day? Not by a colleague or co-worker, but by your devices, tweets, alerts, FarmVille, phone calls, and more? Numerous studies, many long before the advent of social media, reveal some interesting findings around interruptions and multitasking.

In a study by Stanford psychologists Anthony Wagner and Eyal Ophir, they found that college students who often try to juggle many flows of information performed significantly worse than those that limited their multitasking activity.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, surveyed 262 students on their media consumption habits. “We wanted to ask, ‘What happens to people who multitask all the time?’” said Clifford Nass, a Stanford University cognitive scientist.

“These are all very standard tasks in psychology,” said Nass. “In the first, there’s lots of evidence that if people do poorly, they have trouble ignoring irrelevant information. For the second task, there are many demonstrations that this is a good reflection of people’s ability to organize things in their working memory. The third task shows how fast and readily people switch from doing one thing to another.”

“There’s substantial literature on how the brain handles multi-tasking. And basically, it doesn’t…what’s really going on is a rapid toggling among tasks rather than simultaneous processing,” explains Jordan Grafman, chief of the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in an article for the American Management Association.

Read full article at http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1868147/social-media-multitasking-worse-marijuana