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I read the book, Driven to Distraction, a few years ago and became convinced that I and everyone in my family had ADD. Now, I just think there’s too much going on in the world – ‘the world is too much with us’ as Wordsworth put it. There’s too much in daily life to handle without a disciplined approach, which means focusing on one thing at a time. This is hard if, like me, you’ve always prided yourself on being a multi-tasker (and I don’t even own a PDA!). You know, read a book and cook dinner while listening to language tapes and checking email, oops, burnt the broccoli.

And so it goes. Research has shown that the added mental effort of switching tasks makes you less productive even as you have the illusion of getting more done. Some of this data is almost 10 years old, which shows the way the public only hears what it wants to hear as in the plethora of left-brain, right-brain popular psychology books (Drawing from the right brain, etc) that mushroomed in the wake of a study that was shortly disproved (see link in previous post). I’ve been taking a time management course and one of the first things they demonstrate is the fallacy of multi-tasking. They ask a person to walk a straight line along a piece of masking tape on the floor. It’s morning, the guy had had coffee, no problem. Then they ask him to do it while reading a book – the results are comical. This is oversimplified, but a good way to think about what you are asking of yourself when you rely on multi-tasking to manage your life. For more information on this subject, read this highly-entertaining, very informative and thoughtful article by Walter Kirn from Atlantic Magazine. Here’s a quote that sums up the problems and dangers of multi-tasking:

certain studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy.

EEK! Who needs that? (Note: While working on this post, I forced myself not to go downstairs for more coffee, look at my calendar, read incoming email or clean off my desktop. Reading the Kirn article was part of my task, but I resisted reading other interesting Atlantic articles that I noticed on their site.)