How Well Do Multi-Taskers Multi-Task?

Nass, a professor at Stanford University, told the New York Times that he had been “in awe” of multi-taskers and deemed himself to be a poor one. So he and his team of researchers gave 262 students questionnaires to determine how often they multitasked.

They divided their test subjects into two groups of high and low multi-taskers and began with the presumption that the frequent multi-taskers would perform better. They were wrong. “I was sure they had some secret ability” said Nass. “But it turns out that high multi-taskers are suckers for irrelevancy.” They were outperformed on every measure.

Although they’d convinced themselves and the world that they were great at it, there was just one problem.

To quote Nass, “Multi-taskers were just lousy at everything.”

This is an excerpt from The One Thing (a book I HIGHLY recommend to anyone!)