The Terrible Effects of Multitasking

I have read the exciting article about multitasking from a nice-catchy blog of wagenugraha. He offered one rhetoric-question at the beginning of the article. Have you ever experienced when you're doing a task then suddenly there was a disturbance, such as a sudden phone or another tasks that must be addressed immediately ?. Thereafter you feel pretty tiring due to a large energy is needs to return to the original task.

A few days ago, I got another interesting article on mutitasking from motherjones.com The article concerning habits of doing many tasks at one time. Kevin Drum, the writer, explain over multitasking habits of people in these days, e.g., some people contantly checking messages while they socializing with someone else.

Drum told a complaint from his friend, a professor of university. A half of his 60 student of general physics class sits in the back of the room on phone or laptop. The “good” students work on assigments for next classes, but the bad ones are busy with facebook comments.

There are convincing evidences that entrenched multitasking has a long lasting negative effects on cognitive function. According to medical-dictionary, cognitive function is an intellectual process by which one becomes aware of, perceives, or comprehends ideas. It involves all aspects of perception, thinking, reasoning, and remembering.

Clifford Nass, a psychologist from Stanford shown that multitaskers are bad at neither multitasking nor every individual one of the tasks. So, they not just bad at multitasking.

Actually Nass and his colleague were absolutely shocked with the result of the study. The multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They’re bad at passing irrelevant information, fail to keeping information nicely and well organized, and also awkward at switching from one task to another.

Nass also indicated that the multitaskers think they are brilliant at multitasking. When he talk to them about the terrible effects of multitaskers, they claimed they are different with the student involved in the study. The student believed they could handle and manage all these tasks together.

Demonstration of the less efficient of multitaskers not just from Nass works. The facts that people who do two things at once will be less efficient -- has been demontrated many times. For example, people will  remember less of the news when they are distracted by the little text feed at the bottom of news show. Moreover they will be less remember both news and text.

According to Wage, in these days, we are in a culture that addicted to multitasking activities. A large number of tasks sometimes be addressed by doing more tasks at one time. But in facts, the frequent switching between one task to another is tiring and consuming much energy and time. Multitasking also decreasing the productivity of employees and possible to hurt the companies in a fairlly large value. So, Wage recommend us to minimizing the sources of distraction, decreasing interference at work and more focus to completed one job at one time.

Nass suggested to reduce the multitasking habits, be focus, be organized and not waste energy on switching. If we can’t stop multitasking actiities, Nass suggest us to at least take frequent breaks where we fully engaged in single task and exercising our analytic abilities (Undil 2011).
Source:
1. Kevin Drum, 2011, Its Not Just Rude, It’s Ruining Your Brain,motherjones
2. Wage Indrya Nugraha, 2011,Fokus dan Produktivitas, fractal.wordpress.com
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