Most of us do it every day: check our email, text our friends, turn on the radio and make a phone call. In fact, some people are so skilled that they can do all four of these things at the same time! However, it is fair to say that if you work in any type of job that includes computers and marketing, this kind of multitasking ability is usually a requirement.According to a recent study by Stanford University researchers, it was found that people who constantly deal with several different types of electronic information and switch from one task to another:

• Don’t pay attention
• Can’t control their memory
• Switch from one task to another worse than someone who completes a single task at a time

Stanford calls these people “high-tech jugglers,” and they apparently don’t do any better than someone that chooses to take their time completing a single task. Stanford Professor Clifford Nass even says these people are “suckers for irrelevancy” and that “everything distracts them.”

So, are you offended like I am? I consider myself to be a fair multitasker, and I always thought that it was a good thing.  Apparently the researchers at Stanford are out to prove the old theory that it’s impossible to process more than one string of information at a time.

If you’re interested in reading more about the Stanford study that put 100 students through a series of multitasking tests, you can read about it at Stanford University News.

New York Magazine: “In Defense of Distraction”

Anderson on the benefits of distraction:

“The prophets of total attentional meltdown sometimes invoke, as an example of the great culture we’re going to lose as we succumb to e-thinking, the canonical French juggernaut Marcel Proust. And indeed, at seven volumes, several thousand pages, and 1.5 million words, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu is in many ways the anti-Twitter. (It would take, by the way, exactly 68,636 tweets to reproduce.) It’s important to remember, however, that the most famous moment in all of Proust, the moment that launches the entire monumental project, is a moment of pure distraction: when the narrator, Marcel, eats a spoonful of tea-soaked madeleine and finds himself instantly transported back to the world of his childhood. Proust makes it clear that conscious focus could never have yielded such profound magic: Marcel has to abandon the constraints of what he calls “voluntary memory”—the kind of narrow, purpose-driven attention that Adderall, say, might have allowed him to harness—in order to get to the deeper truths available only by distraction. That famous cookie is a kind of hyperlink: a little blip that launches an associative cascade of a million other subjects. This sort of free-associative wandering is essential to the creative process; one moment of judicious unmindfulness can inspire thousands of hours of mindfulness.”