Taking a Look at Mental Workload

In the essay “Multitasking can make you lose … Um … Focus” Alina Tugend exams why multitasking can make you lose focus. Tugend explains what multitasking is in the first section she also explains why it is bad. She then brings in a professor to explain how multitasking works in a scientific way. Alina Tugend then uses case studies to show how multitasking can cause loss of focus and impairment in motor activities. She then shows how multitasking can actually delay your progress on completing projects by constantly switching to different tasks. Tugend then sums it all up by trying to teach us how to better ourselves and to not multitask.

In this paper, I expect to discuss factors which lead to stress in the workplace. Are individuals stressed in the workplace? What causes stress in the workplace? Who is mostly stressed: men or women? Are individuals being exposed to stress management techniques? By recognizing stress in the workplace, employers can act appropriately to reduce stress. The outcome can benefit social and family relationships, as well as preserve ones health and make people more productive in organizations.

Attempts are made to keep employees focused by frequent staff meetings, but people only partially pay attention as managers announce company developments. Management’s perceived need to continually push employees to act right is apparent in the way they handles the missing cover page on Peter’s TPS report. Stress To study stress in the work place, researchers often measure the existing stressors being dealt with by employees. The stressors may be either physical or psychological demands to which an individual responds and, if chronic or persistent, can lead to negative reactions or responses called strains. Physical task stressors include excessive heat, noise, and light, as well as job demands such as a time-pressured work pace, heavier workload, and the amount of hours worked.

The high tech age brings at a fast pace through different sources like TV, radio, internet, newspapers, magazines as well wanted or unwanted phone calls, instant message, social network messages, web searches, emails etc. One of the advantage of having 24/7 virtual office is businesses can capitalize on the evolving nature of the office by striking a balance that combines virtual and physical work and space which could ultimately increase productivity and lower costs without sacrificing company culture or individual motivation. One of the biggest issues facing the organization is employees facing loss of productivity, stressed, and burnout due to information and email overload. Information overload describes an excess of information

In 1974 the researchers Baddeley and Hitch argued that the picture of short-term memory (STM) provided by the Multi-Store Model was far too simple. Following the Multi-Store Model, it is believed that STM holds limited amounts of information for short periods of time with relatively little processing, it is believed to be a unitary store. This means that due to its single store it has no subsystems, unlike the Working Memory Model which has many subsystems. This proves that the Working Memory is not a unitary store.

The main point of the article is to view the connection between Working Memory Capacity (WMC) and concussions. It starts off by introducing the concept of WMC, and it proceeds to explain its importance in athletics. The article then branches out to take statistics on concussion data based on AOSPAN scores, gender, and sport. The article finishes by comparing said data and providing the conclusion that WMC does not differ between athletes regardless of the contact level of their sport or their previous concussion history.

To implement high cognitive demand tasks, we need to plan for the tasks accordingly to promote reasoning and problem solving skills, help our students to explain and justify the answers, give the students chance to discuss and validate the results, and ask students to explain their thinking about the math concepts. I divided each class into teams of four to work collaboratively on the tasks. Another strategy I did during these tasks was revise and find different ways to make the tasks easier to start and complete within the groups.

Student stress seems to be a major theme throughout the novel, The Overachievers: the secret lives of driven kids. The author establishes this theme by providing examples of the stress caused from academics to parental pressure. The cause of each overachiever’s problems seem to be stress. They stress over not being good enough even though they are all extremely knowledgeable and self-driven. Whether it’s not getting all As or not meeting your parents goals, each student in this novel suffers an incredibly unhealthy amount of stress, then they should.

People should be punished for not taking action in a life and death situation. In the article the author, Jay Sterling Silver, believes that civil liability should be established for everyone everywhere. I somewhat agree with his point because it’s the right thing to do but that’s not always the case. During a life and death situation people tend to panic and when they do they start to lose control because they are torn between taking action or calling 911 but it might be too late for that. People will act without precaution in an emergency or some will not act at all because they’re scared they might make the situation worse than what it is.

In Alina Tugend’s article “Multitasking Can Make You Lose…Um…Focus,” the author discusses the dangers of attempting to multitask. Life in the twenty-first century tends to be fast paced which is one of the reasons why there is so much multitasking. Because we want everything fast, we try to get as many things accomplished in the shortest amount of time. According to “The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress,” a study that from April of 2007, while multitasking one is not able to produce as much. University of California professor Gloria Marks noticed that multitasking resulted in higher stress levels, workload, frustration, and pressure; such factors may bring about results that are less than acceptable.

Organization, processing, multitasking, focus and concentration are Mr. Tarabolski’s most significant challenges. He has problems keeping paperwork organized and sometimes loses assignments that he has completed and printed out. Memorization of information is difficult, instead he learns better by being actively involved. Mr. Tarabolski states that he does better and produces higher quality work when he only has to do one thing at a time. The pressure from having multiple assignments due at the same time causes stress and affects his work product.

To help reduce stress for myself, even through I know its quite common practice for most managers I would write down a list of all my tasks and then put them in priority order according to timescales, importance and whether I could or could not delegate the task I would also consider how long they might take, having a list especially when I am feeling stressed helps me focus and ticking areas off can have a positive effect on me as the list reduces.

Hook: Everyone thinks that multitasking is good for the brain and that everyone should want that skill. Well unfortunately studies proven by scientist at the institute in Paris Santé et de la Recherche Médication found that the brain splits into two, basically splitting the attention. It was said that at the most someone can do two things at once depending on the ease of the tasks. The reason being for this is due to the two frontal lobes of the brain designed to help someone with tasks.

Multitasking is becoming very significant on the workplace to complete the task in less time. In fact, some people believe that multitasking saves time and can be done at all together. On the other hand, some people think that it is a distracting activity which leads to a lack of concentration. According to David Silverman, “In Defense of Multitasking”, multitasking is “crucial to survival in today’s workplace” (522). However, I do not agree because multitasking reduces productivity, increases stress levels and it is, especially, problematic for students.

Studies from different parts of the world made by different health organizations have showed that long working hours and pressured work lead to stress which affects the employees mentally and physically and leads indirectly to low productivity levels. Not only stress, but it can cause a lot more of health issues like extreme fatigue including sleepiness, poor concentration, and increased susceptibility to illness. These symptoms can a have a noticed effect on the general productivity of an organization.