Young People Multi-tasking… Not so Well

You’ve probably read a little about this younger generation being better multi-taskers than we are. If you’ve attended my CONNECT workshop or any of my PARENTING workshops, you’ve heard me talk about it.

A new report from researchers at Stanford says that even though they might be multi-tasking… they might not be doing it very effectively.

Yahoo news reports:

The people who multitask the most are the ones who are worst at it. That’s the surprising conclusion of researchers at Stanford University, who found multitaskers are more easily distracted and less able to ignore irrelevant information than people who do less multitasking.

(the entire article on multi-tasking)

I’ve been reading debate about this fact for years (I’ve blogged about multi-tasking before). I recall articles that argued kids can indeed multi-task better, but it creates more stress.

Our kids are growing up in a world that almost demands better multi-tasking skills. As the years progress, it will be interesting to see if the end result of this mayhem is two steps forward… or a step backward.

Ever wish you could just slow everything down two notches? I think of a line from the movie The Shawshank Redemption when Brooks got out of jail after serving almost his entire life behind bars. “The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry.”

(ht to David)