MONDAY, Aug. 24, 2009 (Health.com) — Ever find yourself chatting via instant messaging while checking your email and surfing the Web? Well, don’t pat yourself on the back for your super-productive behavior.
A new study suggests that people who often do multiple tasks in a variety of media—texting, instant messaging, online video watching, word processing, Web surfing, and more—do worse on tests in which they need to switch attention from one task to another than people who rarely multitask in this way.
Specifically, heavy multitaskers are more easily distracted by irrelevant information than those who aren’t constantly in a multimedia frenzy, according to the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
One reason may be because the multitaskers tend to retain the distracting information in their short-term memory, which affects their ability to focus, compared with people who don’t check their email while talking on the phone and sneaking in some online shopping.
“This study adds to a growing body of literature that says, in general, that multitasking is going to be problematic for people, that it does compromise productivity, and that its consequences can be quite severe in situations like driving,” says David W. Goodman, MD, the director of the Adult Attention Deficit Disorder Center of Maryland, in Baltimore, who was not involved in the research.
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