Multitasking: A Waste of Time

Texting and walking. Listening to music and studying. E-mailing and taking notes during class.

When you try to accomplish two dissimilar tasks, your brain just can’t take it.

Simultaneously, two separate tasks require attention and analysis, and your brain can’t process these fast enough to efficiently encode them into your short-term memory.

What is short-term memory?

Short-term memory, also known as working memory, stores visual images or verbal information (etc.) for a very short time (approximately 30 to 60 seconds)– and has very limited capacity.

To be exact, the capacity of our working memories is 7 ± 2 objects.

This means at any time, our short-term memories hold five to a maximum of nine items (also known as Miller’s Law, named after Dr. George A. Miller).

These “items” can be anything from simple numbers you see or words you hear, and when too many items fill up your working memory, only a limited amount are processed and encoded.

When items don’t make it into your working memory, they definitely do not make it into your long-term memory.

And if these items don’t make it into your long-term memory, then they can’t be recalled later.

No recall = No usage.

So multitasking, or cramming too much information in for your brain to handle, doesn’t benefit you– it makes you even less efficient than if you were to focus solely on one task.

This is the same reason why many students find cramming before quizzes or tests to be ineffective; when it comes time for the final exam, that information is nowhere to be found in your memory– because it was never stored effectively into your long-term memory for recall.

Your brain is an amazing organ, but it has its limitations too.

If you want to be efficient, take things one at a time.

Divert your attention from 2 or more things and focus it to just one, completing them one after another.

Multitasking doesn’t make you more efficient or keep those levels of efficiency the same– it harms productivity and is wasting the time that you could have spent doing one thing right, rather than juggling two or more things to unsuccessfully complete all of them.

Give your brain a break!

Cowan, Nelson (2008). “What are the differences between long-term, short-term, and working memory?”. Prog Brain Res. 169(169): 323–338. doi:10.1016/S0079-6123(07)00020-9.

Miller, G. A. (1956). “The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information”.Psychological Review 63 (2): 81–97. doi:10.1037/h0043158.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/douglasmerrill/2012/08/17/why-multitasking-doesnt-work/

http://thestrategyguysite.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Dilbert-Multitasking.png

http://serendipitylabs.com/wp-content/uploads/labs-multitasking.jpg