Go figure: focusing on a dozen things poorly, running from fragmented job to fragmented job, trying to shift mindsets from tactical to strategic and struggling to figure out where you left a certain task might have long-term negative effects.

After jumping through the mental hoops, the researchers found that the heavy multimedia users were at a disadvantage. Compared with those who rarely used more than one type of media at a time, heavy multitaskers had slower response times, most often because they were more easily distracted by irrelevant information, and because they retained that useless information in their short-term memory. While the delay was only about half a second in some tests, this could be enough to cause problems in everyday life, says Goodman, who is also an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "You're being flooded with too much information and you can't selectively filter out quickly which is important and which is not important," says Goodman.

• Heavy-multitaskers did worse on attention tests than non-multitaskers.
• Multitaskers are more easily distracted and susceptible to irrelevant information.
• Multitaskers often retain useless information in short-term memory.
• Negative effects from sustained multimedia multitasking may not be reversible.
• The good news: multitasking cannot cause ADHD, which is rooted in genetic susceptibility.

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David Ulin, writing for the LA Times, perfectly soliloquizes the problems he’s been having sitting down to read.  I’ve been struggling with the same thing for about two years now:

So what happened? It isn't a failure of desire so much as one of will. Or not will, exactly, but focus: the ability to still my mind long enough to inhabit someone else's world, and to let that someone else inhabit mine. Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves. This is what Conroy was hinting at in his account of adolescence, the way books enlarge us by giving direct access to experiences not our own. In order for this to work, however, we need a certain type of silence, an ability to filter out the noise.

Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know.

I won’t bullshit anyone: my issue is that I’d rather be reading feeds, articles, posts and writing my own stuff than reading longform books. I have amazing books sitting on the shelf – Infinite Jest, Consider the Lobster, Brain Rules, Transcend, The Ultramind Solution – and I just can’t get to them.  But I can read David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College commencement speech twice a week.  That’s what it’s come to.

When I was younger – before the hyper-networked age came along and ruined those us prone to such ruining – I read books at a voracious rate.  Today, even getting through a really easy murder mystery is next to impossible.

(To be fair, the aforelinked book sucked, which might make it an unfair example.  But you get the point.)

If I were smart, I would have devoted myself to Infinite Summer.  Maybe that would have helped.

But I doubt it.

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More goodness from Merlin Man, and it's high time someone said this: multi-tasking is a myth.  It's one of the most virulent and misunderstood and dangerous concepts of the last two decades.  As human beings, we don't do well doing more than one thing at a time; in fact, we're quite shitty at it.  This sort of fragmentation leads to open loops, stress, distractions and lower quality of work.

Unfortunately, you have to tell everyone you multi-task incredibly well lest you be considered archaic and unproductive.  If you want to talk about real skill, then talk about offshoots of rapid cognition and the ability to focus and single-task tenaciously while keeping the blinking lights and distractions on the periphery.  But that's another discussion.

If multi-tasking were a natural state for human minds, we wouldn't be seeking so many systems for organization and managing modern life's multiple information sources.  We wouldn't be stressed out and on the border of ADD.  The notion of personal focus wouldn't be so readily slaughtered at the altar of perceived productivity.

Great podcast right here, and worth listening to more than once.  Money quote:

“Multi-taskers” are really just splitting their time and attention into smaller slices than you; no one can really do more than one thing at a time. (2:34)

This is spot-on, and it's time we stop pretending it isn't.

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One hour I guarantee you won't want to get back. Mann is a coolhunter in the sense that he understands the trends of the information age and the unique problems they present to you, the technology-rich first-worlder. Mann's blog, 43folders, is one of my daily must-reads. If you're not familiar with it, you should be. You'll never look at your inbox the same way again. Link to IDEO video

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