Certain Habits

Another reason I’d rather be a hedgehog:

“Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident in their abilities,” says Clifford I. Nass, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. “But there’s evidence that those people are actually worse at multitasking than most people.”

Indeed, last summer Nass and two colleagues published a study that found that self-described multitaskers performed much worse on cognitive and memory tasks that involved distraction than did people who said they preferred to focus on single tasks. Nass says he was surprised at the result: He had expected the multitaskers to perform better on at least some elements of the test. But no. The study was yet another piece of evidence for the unwisdom of multitasking.

The entire article in the Chronicle of Education is worth reading. I can take (a little) solace in this, though: scholars admit that the direction of causation is unclear. It might not be the distractions, but what makes people distractible, that leads to poor performance.