STOP multi-tasking & learn to FOCUS
09:12, 25 August 2009
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Stanford University has published a study that the AP has called "surprising": people who multitask are more easily distracted and less able to ignore irrelevant information than people who do less multitasking. In other words, multitaskers can't concentrate on a single task and do it well; instead, they do a lot of things not very well."The huge finding is, the more media people use the worse they are at using any media. We were totally shocked," Clifford Nass, a professor at Stanford's communications department, said in the AP article.
Huh? Shocked? Really? Are Stanford researchers THAT out of touch and naive?
I wasn't AT ALL shocked. It's confirmation of something I've known for a long, long time! Just look around! Take your eyes off your computer or the text screen on your cell phone or whatever and LOOK AROUND YOU. At work. In a restaurant. At a stop light. On the street. At a conference. In a staff meeting. In a room full of friends. In a class. Wherever!
People are crashing their cars while texting. You call a colleague on the phone to discuss something or deliver information and know they are not really listening to you, as they are trying to IM or fill out a form at the same time. You visit that colleague in his or her office and know little of what you say is being heard, as the colleague looks at his computer or PDA more than you. At conferences, it's impossible to strike up conversations with people around you -- something essential to make a conference valuable -- as they all have their heads buried in their lap tops, talking to people elsewhere instead of the people right there next to them, eager to connect. At workshops, people are texting on their cell phone or IMing on their laptop rather than listening to the presenter, showing their inattention when they "wake up" and ask a question that was answered long ago. In staff meetings, they ask questions all answered in the two-page briefing document they never got around to reading.
And even worse: people are making up their minds about world events, government policies, candidates running for office and proposed activities by various organizations based on snippets they've glanced at online or on comments heard by a pundit on the radio or TV as they are doing two or three other things at the same time. Debates have become easy for me to win these days because I actually still READ and have more than sound bites to refer to.
Multi-tasking muddles minds -- no surprise here!
The ability to concentrate on a single task, to get it done properly and completely, or to concentrate on a single content source, reading or listening thoroughly to the information provided, is rapidly becoming a lost skill, and the workplace, public discourse and even every day community life is suffering for it. We're not becoming more efficient and productive: we're becoming more distracted, less inclined to complete tasks on time, less likely to do a quality job, and less likely to really, substantially connect with new people. It also affects our quality of life: there are generations who seem to not know how to become engrossed in a movie, how to sit and people-watch, how to just be in the moment, and that means they aren't really satisfied with anything.
My tag line on Yahoo for a few years now has been "Read More Books." The world would be a better place if more people did, not only because knowledge is a wonderful, empowering, enlightening thing, but also because it would teach people the power of "single-tasking", or the power of concentration, of focus.
Take just 10 minutes every other hour to read something related to work -- memos from colleagues, abstracts from journal articles, an executive summary -- without doing anything else. Don't answer your phone while a colleague is in your office. Turn away from your computer when you are on the phone. Sit and listen intently to a presenter for even just the first 10 minutes, without doing anything else. Introduce yourself to two people sitting near you at a workshop. Never ever write emails while trying to listen to a phone call, a presenter or a colleague. These are little things. And if you do them, you will LOVE the results!
And speaking of reading, you can see what books I've read, what I'm reading, and what I want to read.
