While flying back from Paris a few days ago I paged through the US Airways magazine.  My eyes were immediately caught by the title of a short article, “Multitasking 101”,  since I have written and spoken quite a bit about the ways in which multitasking leads to poorer performance.

I have noticed how multitasking leads to less depth of thinking and work as well as a lessening of the ability to concentrate.  I’ve worried about the long term impact of losing the ability to pay attention to one thing at a time and delve into it in great depth.

So I was hardly surprised by the results of a study by James M Kraushaar and David C Novak of the University of Vermont.  Although it was done with the favorite research animal of academics, college students, I think it generalizes to the people working in your company.

It seems they found that “fully 62 percent of the Web windows that college students open on their laptops during class are completely unrelated to the class.” 

Not only that, the “students who allocate their cognitive resources this way get lower grades than their more attentive peers.”  This is hardly surprising.  Split your attention or totally divert it to some unrelated but…at least in your mind…more interesting thing on the internet, and you do worse on those things where your attention should be directed.

Even worse,  Kraushaar and Novak go on to mention that “instant messaging is an ‘especially virulent’ distraction.” 

It got me thinking that the a measure of the value placed on whatever you’re saying to your team or whatever is going on in a meeting can be evaluated by the number of people playing with their electronic devices rather than paying attention to you.

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