Is multitasking really effective for getting work done?

Annie Murphy Paul's article on Slate titled "You'll Never Learn!" says it does not. Every young people thinks they can multitask. The proliferation of electronic gadgets, popular among the young and the hip, has made multitasking virtually a bi-word nowadays. But does it work?

The Larry Rosen study, conducted on students from middle school and high school to college found that multitasking students, as all of the subjects of the study did, spent only 65 per cent of the time actually doing schoolwork. The constant checking of electronic gadgets like phones, or watching TV, listening to music, updating Facebook statuses invariably took a toll on the ability of the students to actually get schoolwork done. This study is a confirmation of another one shown on the National Geographic Channel a couple of months ago, I think way back in November 2012 if my memory serves me right, about the negative effects of multitasking, shown when the NGC show asked a multitasking dad, who was asked to text and  drive at the same time, at the same time navigating an obstacle course which consisted of road markers which should not be knocked out. In short, the multitasking dad bumped more road markers when texting while driving than when focused on driving only. Clearly demonstrating that for important tasks, it is actually dangerous to multitask - and in fact proves that multitasking is just not effective in getting important more done. And in some cases, is actually downright dangerous if not totally suicidal.

I'd like to think I can multitask, a few days ago, actually two days ago, I discovered that any Windows 7 running computer can be configured to be a Wi-fi router, eliminating the need to secure an independent Wi-fi machine. With this discovery, I opened up my Lenovo notebook, together with my Dell Inspiron E 1705 laptop and my iPhone 3gs, all of them connected to the internet and trying to do a task on each device. Not only was it a stiff-neck inducing experience, what with all the turning I need to do, but it was actually a headache, with minimal quality task accomplished on each device other than the superficial checking here and there of what's on the screen. If any meaningful task were to be finished, its quality would undoubtedly suffer. If at all it could even be accomplished in time. On top of that, a lot of energy is gobbled up by the machines that is not commensurate with the activity I was able to accomplish!

It got me thinking therefore that multitasking is merely a glorified, techno-laden term that is nothing more than "distracting activities" performed at the same time while doing some really important task. Although the NGC study was not scientifically done, it showed that multitasking, as confirmed by the Rosen study, is not feasible at least when important tasks are to be accomplished, and to be accomplished with quality and on time. The human brain cannot just do more than one, maybe two at most, critical things without sacrificing quality on the output.  Unless one is merely watching TV and texting while checking out social networking sites, in other words doing leisure activities, then multitasking is just another word for failure.

If one is to finish important tasks with any degree of quality and finesse, multitasking is not the game. Tech companies, especially Smartphones manufacturers, have relentlessly convinced us thru its multitasking-capable products that multitasking is the future, is the in-thing today when in fact it is one way of flooding the brain with information that eventually crashes its ability to focus - well, even computers do crash, think of DNS attacks!