The Effects of Multi Tasking
Most students have a hard time handling their time wisely. If you are like most students, your workspace looks something like this: A cluttered room piled high with papers, textbooks, and binders. You likely have a television, a cell phone, an Mp3 player, a laptop, a video game console (or two), and a DVD player. You’re playing music, have the TV on, and are surfing the internet with your textbook perched on your lap. There’s probably an open bag of chips and a soda within arm’s reach.
This might seem like the ultimate in convenience, but the sheer volume of choices and forms of mental stimulation can wreak havoc with your ability to focus on important tasks, such as writing your college essays.“In the age of
Conclusions: Emergency physicians are “interrupt driven.” Emergency physicians are frequently interrupted and many interruptions result in breaks-in-task. But newly released results of scientific studies in multitasking(2010) indicate that carrying on several duties at once may, in fact, reduce productivity, not increase it."In some cases, you could be wasting your employer's time," says researcher Joshua Rubinstein, Ph.D., formerly of the University of Michigan and now with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) working on security issues. "And in certain cases" of multitasking, Rubinstein says, "you could be risking employers a dangerous outcome." In the research behind an article titled "Executive Control of Cognitive Processes in Task Switching" -- being published Monday in the American Psychological Association's Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance -- Rubinstein and his associates David Meyer, Ph.D., and Jeffrey Evans, Ph.D., determined that for various types of tasks, subjects lost time when they had to switch from one task to another. These "time costs" increased with the complexity of the chores: It took longer, say researchers Rubinstein and Meyer, for subjects to switch between more complicated tasks. "People in a work setting," says Meyer, "who are banging away on word processors at the same time they have to answer phones and talk to their co-workers or bosses -- they're doing