Do one thing at a time — don’t reply to messages while in a meeting
Original: eternity4719 · source details
Original author: eternity4719 · Chinese source: · English adaptation: parveen0029. Translation and grade notes ↗
Bibliographic titles are retained in their original language.
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Cost and benefit at a glance
- Check the cost Cost ↓
- No cost at all. It does take a bit of willpower to resist replying to messages during a meeting.
- Then the source benefit Benefit ↓
- Switching between tasks clearly slows reaction time and raises the chance of mistakes. This conclusion comes from a review of multiple studies. One lab study involved university st…
In plain terms
Every time you switch tasks, your reaction time slows down and errors become more likely. People who regularly keep multiple screens open at once don’t actually get better at multitasking; in fact, they perform worse on task-switching tests.
This guide's cartoon · show illustration
Enlarge illustrationOriginal illustration with Chinese lettering; the English dialogue is below. Humour is a reading aid, not evidence.
English dialogue
- Just five minutes of rest.
- One more notification!
Cost: what it takes
No cost at all. It does take a bit of willpower to resist replying to messages during a meeting.
Benefit: what the source reports
Switching between tasks clearly slows reaction time and raises the chance of mistakes. This conclusion comes from a review of multiple studies. One lab study involved university students. Those who frequently use several types of media at the same time are known as heavy media multitaskers. They’re more easily distracted by unrelated things and unrelated memories, and they also perform worse on task-switching tests.
Conditions, limits and disagreements
Exactly how much extra effort task-switching requires varies a lot depending on the task, so no single number can be given here. The Ophir study compares people at one single point in time, so it’s hard to tell whether multitasking makes attention worse, or whether people with poorer attention skills simply prefer to multitask.
Original references
Original bibliographic titles and links are preserved; some titles are in Chinese.
Monsell (2003). Task switching. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00028-7；Ophir, Nass & Wagner (2009). Cognitive control in media multitaskers. PNAS. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0903620106
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