Technology allows us to be able to surf the web, email, text, blog, share pictures, comment, and create profiles all at once. But does multitasking really even exist? When thinking about it, are we really able to email while we are commenting on someone’s profile? Or even text while we are driving? Even though some people do text while they are driving, they are not actually mentally doing both things at the same time. As soon as our eyes leave the windshield to look at the screens of our phones, our minds have mentally check out of driving and are fully focused on the text message. Reaction rate and thought processes from the road are completely gone as soon as we focus on the message. Multitasking does not exist. Eyal Ohhir, a researcher at Stanford University that underwent a project on multitasking, said, “We task-switch. We just switch very quickly between tasks, and it feels like we ‘re multitasking.” Farther in the study it went into detail about how people who are good at “multitasking,” or task switching, can only perform a sub-par job on the things they are juggling because they can not focus 100% of their attention on their tasks. Ultimately, depending on the person some people are better at handling more tasks at once than others. This article stressed that dividing, managing, and preserving attention is different for everybody; but that the world is full of distractions. The hard part is figuring out the best way to handle tasks for yourself that give you the best results.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/if-multitasking-is-impossible-why-are-some-people-so-good-at-it/248648/
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/12/you_cant_multi-task_so_stop_tr.html
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