Alina Tugend Multitasking Can Make You Lose Summary

To begin with, multitasking creates a great deal of stress and pressure for the individual. When someone is bombarded with many tasks it becomes overwhelming to try to handle them all at one time. Tugend explains that doing routine tasks are easy to multitask, but once more “cognitive thinking” is used it becomes impossible to be able to focus on both at once. Attempting to can easily cause

In the essay “Multitasking can make you lose … Um … Focus” Alina Tugend exams why multitasking causes you to lose focus and how it is counterproductive. Tugend explains what multitasking is in the first section and that since the 90s we have widely accepted it into our daily lives. She also brings a credible professor named Earl Miller to elaborate on multitasking and how it is explained in a scientific manor. As this professor goes on he talks about how its misleading and that multitasking doesn’t actually benefit us, it actually hinders are ability to be productive. Tugend uses multiple case studies to back up this information and to even support her own argument that multitasking causes loss of focus.

In “The Multitasking Generation”, Claudia Wallis provides key points on the difference between Generation M and Multitasking. Wallis also challenges the idea that by multitasking, things get done. In the first part of the essay Wallis provides information on a family living in California. A man and a woman with twins, one girl and one boy. Wallis observes that most of the time spent at home by the children is on a computer with music blaring and chatting with friends on their cell phones. Wallis states, “By all standard space-time calculations, the four members of the family occupy the same three-bedroom home in Van Nuys, California…, but psychologically each exists in his or her own little universe.”(385-386) In today’s world, “That level

Multitasking: A Poor Study Habit by Noelle Alberto shows that multitasking is a bad thing do when studying. Ablerto gives four main points in her article, those points being, that multitasking while studying doesn’t save time, multitasking doesn’t prepare you for the business world, damages the students ability to learn, and causes students not to gain the trait that helps for paying attention. Throughout her article she provides evidence to prove these four points to a decent extent. I would disagree with the point that multitasking isn’t saving time because of having to switch back and forth between tasks. I don’t believe this point because personally I know I save time from multitasking while studying.

Multitasking, helpful or harmful? In Alina Tugend’s “Multitasking Can Make You Lose…Um…Focus”, Tugend explores multitasking in several ways. Explaining how we as humans sacrifice focus “shifting focus from task to task gives illusion that we’re simultaneously tasking”. Also, how our brains react to operating and trying to do more than one task at once. Only one or two visual stimulants can activate our neurons at one particular time. Lastly, how we can recreate boundaries and cope with everyday life and multitasking. Tugend reiterates several times the importance of one task at a time so we as humans can effectively complete tasks to the best of our abilities instead of giving partial focus and not efficiently completely a task. Multitasking is very beneficial at times, but more often there are significant downfalls; it is crucial we learn how to manage the downfalls of juggling tasks, events, conversations, and daily events.

My View on Multitasking After reading two separate essays in my Reflections textbook, one on “In Defense of Multitasking” and the other “How (and Why) to Stop Multitasking” I have come across many new reasons on why I believe not multitasking may be more beneficial than multitasking. It has brought new light that multitasking actually reduces productivity, it seems to be looked at as more of an addiction to those who are short attention spanned and multitasking is also more of a necessity in order to survive in today’s workplace rather that actually being something beneficial to the individual and others around them. A conflicting viewpoint that I have come across in the essay of “In Defense of Multitasking” by David Silverman, would be that he does not have a strong start.

During the holidays, I decided to read Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. Ironically, I was not getting anything done and barely made it through a page without going to check my Twitter timeline and Facebook news feed. Although I kept my gadgets away to allow me concentrate, I continuously gravitated towards them without concentrating on the book. While the internet has become a godsend to us as a society, it has had adverse effects on our ability to maintain deep concentration.

This documentary covers a wide range of issues cognate to technology and concludes on a note that suggests that technology is not going away, in fact it is rapidly adapting, as such the future of the digital nation is unknown and unpredictable. (No kidding, right?) Yet, what I found concretely intriguing was the documentaries discussion of multitasking in relation to inculcation and developing with technology.

In the National Public Radio (NPR) broadcast, the author claimed humans cannot do several things at once. Humans simply move our attention to different tasks hastily and multitasking is honestly a myth. The author has sought out the truth and used examples ranging from working in a diner with many tasks to do at once to explaining a test recently conducted at the University of Michigan. With the resources and examples the author provided, they have successfully argued humans cannot multitask. Before listening to the broadcast, I knew no one could truly multitask guilelessly because I do not know anyone who can. The myth of multitasking got more popular as technology grew over time. Humans believe they can play a game on their smartphone and

When you are trying to do something difficult, you focus on it. When you try to talk a passenger through landing a DC-10, you need all your focus so the plane doesn’t crash; it’s almost an impossible task. It’s the same when you multitask: you need all your focus to do one task, how can you focus on

Multitasking is often said by others to be unsatisfactory because it “makes people not understand something to the best extent” and it “makes people fail”. However, multitasking can be done where it won’t affect people. Multitasking can be used in certain situations, like when you are doing homework, when you are studying for a test, and when you are in a rush.

What you view as harmless multitasking affects your efficiency because our brains have cognitive limits. According to “How to Do One Thing at a Time” published by Women’s Health Magazine, Clifford Nass, Ph.D., a professor at Stanford University performed an experiment on a group of students. A group of students was asked to spend 30 minutes to compile a playlist, chat, and write a short essay. Another group of students spent 10 minutes focusing on each task individually. After they completed their tasks, they were given a memory test. Professor Nass concluded that single-taskers did significantly better on the memory test than multi-taskers.

Today, our world seems to move at a million miles an hour. Whether you are a college student studying for three different midterms while facetiming your friends and family, a mom who needs to drop off her son at soccer practice while taking an important conference call, a store manager trying to deal with an unhappy customer while simultaneously restocking shelves, or a high school student trying to write a history paper while hanging out with friends and stretching before basketball practice, “multitasking,” is inevitably becoming part of daily life. Today’s generation actively “multitasks”, whether they realize it or not, it could be argued that this is good or bad.

The article “Positives from Multitasking” published by Psych Central News states the following, “The new study by graduate student Kevin Lui and Alan Wang, Ph.D., from The Chinese University of Hong Kong shows that individuals who frequently use different types of media at the same time appear to be better at integrating information from multiple senses- sound and sight, for instance.” Thus, we can conclude that using technology for more than one thing while studying can be beneficial. A report from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that sixty-five percent of the time when students are studying in front of their computers, they're doing something else. Kids and teens are already used to using technology while studying. Seventeen year old Megan Casady of SIlver Spring texts, checks the weather, calls someone, volunteers for campus cleanup, and checks Facebook, all while doing her AP biology homework. So a teen can successfully multitask with technology. And although Megan’s parents worry about her, it’s “hard to argue with a teenager who boasts a 3.85 unweighted grade-point average.” So despite multitasking frequently, a student can still do

We 're moving towards a culture of multitasking, where our daily focus is being split into thousand different