Friday Freebie: What I'm Reading in Ten Minutes or Less: Multitasking

William Iven, via unsplash.com

Yesterday, I finished a piece I'd queried about so long ago I'm embarrassed to tell you (so I won't). Suffice to say it was long overdue.

So long, in fact, that I needed to update my information. The piece was on multitasking, something we convince ourselves is a good thing, but, as it turns out, isn't. When we multitask, we don't actually do two things simultaneously; instead, we force our brains to switch back and forth between tasks rapidly, exhausting ourselves and interfering with learning and memory in the process. I wrote a blog for CatholicMom.com about this almost two years ago, sparked by information I'd heard on NPR. In working on this more recent piece, I came across an article on slate.com that applied this specifically to multitasking while studying.

If you have a teenager in your house, or are addicted to multitasking yourself (especially multitasking that involves electronic devices), the Slate article is worth a read. Though it doesn't qualify as an update to my information (it was written two months before I wrote my blog post for Tech Talk), it definitely expanded my awareness on the topic.

I should warn you that although you can read the article in ten minutes or less, if you click on all the links in this post, it will take you more than the allotted ten minutes to get through everything -- something that becomes increasingly more difficult for chronic multitaskers to do.

Can you do it? Or have you been outsmarted by your smartphone?