Multitasking Leave You Frazzled?

Do you feel overwhelmed on the job as text messages arrive on your cell, the phone rings and someone steps into your work space?  One professional woman in her early 60's said she came home exhausted after work.  "When she put a loaf of bread in the dryer, she said she knew she had to stop burning the candle at both ends," Edward T. Creagan, M.D. of the Mayo Clinic shares.

Throughout the day, I get curious about who's sent me an email or what's happening around the world, so I quickly check Twitter or my email for a quick update. But my attention quickly moves to these formats and off my current work.  Even though I think I can trust my will-power to check at scheduled points in a day, before I know it I look in without thinking and my focus shifts.  Is this true for you as well?

Imagine this... "Allison Miller, aged 14, sends and receives 27,000 text messages a month, according to Seth Godin. "Hey, that's only about sixty an hour, every hour she's awake."

Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.  And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.

Added to that, the nonstop interactivity is one of the most significant shifts ever in the human environment, said Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco.

For example, when Gloria Mark, University of California at Irvine researcher first started her faculty job, she only completed a small portion of what she hoped to do in a day.  "Madness," she thought. "I'm trying to do 30 things at once."  Mark decided to figure out why multitasking worked against her. Mark, a scientist of human-computer interactions conducted a research study to find out more.

When she "crunched the data, a picture of 21st-century office work emerged that was, she says, far worse than I could ever have imagined." Is this typical at your workplace?

Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What's more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.

Though Gloria Mark and Mary Czerwinski, an interruption scientist, separately looked at people working at their desks, a pattern emerged. People stuck all kinds of Post-It notes around their computer screens. Workers swore this made them feel calmer.

Consider this possibility...

But did more screen area actually help with cognition? Czerwinski mulled it over. As a result, she compared the number of tasks completed for a group of 15 workers at a 15 inch monitor versus the number of tasks the same workers completed at a 42 inch monitor. Productivity...

On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly. They were also more likely to remember the seven-digit number, which showed that the multitasking was clearly less taxing on their brains. Some of the volunteers were so enthralled with the huge screen that they begged to take it home. In two decades of research, Czerwinski had never seen a single tweak to a computer system so significantly improve a user's productivity. The clearer your screen, she found, the calmer your mind. So her group began devising tools that maximized screen space by grouping documents and programs together - making it possible to easily spy them out of the corner of your eye, ensuring that you would never forget them in the fog of your interruptions.

These insights can help us work more effectively with our brain than against it.

What's your experience?

Hmmm... think I'll see where I can get a good buy on a larger computer monitor. You?