Damn it! Stanford did a little study about multi-tasking, it didn’t bode well for us. Here are the headlines,

“Multitaskers Pay A Mental Price”

“Masters of Multitasking Fall Short”

“Multi-tasking Muddles The Brain”

You get the picture and I am sure you want to argue; so did I.  Except I kind of already realized it in the back of my mind.  I would turn down the speakers when I was writing something of great importance or putting together a thought.

They do say that multitaskers like to scan for information. So maybe it isn’t about us getting so much done but about us finding more information. I run my laptop and desktop at the same time. I am constantly bouncing between the two. Often one has a video and the other has work on it. I realize I am not as quick with the work as I previously believed but I understand I like the flood of information.

Now this may go along with the memory issue. I like to take in tons of information like Cliff Clavin, but I can’t regurgitate it all back to you. I quickly forget much of it. I know random things and I know useful stuff too. Twitter is like crack for my brain.

So maybe multi-tasking is really about keeping our brains occupied and not about us doing more which brings us back to Zen and the monkey mind racing around. So what do we value, grabbing information from everywhere while finding the nuggets or diligently sitting down and doing one thing at a time until it is done? I don’t have the answer yet. Do you?