Thursday 27 August 2009

Multitasking

You can't do it.

''They're suckers for irrelevancy,'' said Stanford's communication professor, Clifford Nass. ''Everything distracts them.''

The researchers found that people prone to juggling emails, web searches, text chats and videos performed worse than those who did one task at a time.

''We kept looking for what they're better at, and we didn't find it,'' said Eyal Ophir, the lead author. Social science has long held that people cannot process more than one string of information at a time, say the researchers, who wanted to find out how multi-taskers evaded that rule. Tests on 100 students show they are not exempt.



From today's SMH

3 comments:

Ali said...

Hey Gordon,
Hope you're going well? Have you done something to your blog? - it doesn't work in google reader anymore - you just get the first bit of everything. I can't visit actual blogs at work so it's frustrating :).

Gordon Cheng said...

Ali nice to hear from you. I set it to do short feeds so that I would hear from my friends. ;-)

Nah not really, just an experiment. I have a sidebar that I feel an affection for, I put links in it and unless people click through they don't get to see it. So the short feed was to encourage the click through.

But the experiment is over now, so back to the way it was!

Ali said...

Oh thank you! Well, I guess your experiment worked then in pulling your friends through. :)

I did actually get the "unclutterer" website from your feeds - "a place for everything and everything in its place" is now my new goal, so you have done me some service.

I shall enjoy the full thing today. Cheers, and have a nice weekend.