Multi muddle

This can’t be much of a surprise to anyone with common sense:

All those obnoxious, Type A folks who brag about “multi-tasking” are not nearly as efficient and productive as they think.

In fact, according to researchers at Stanford University, which has a bunch of really smart people and not just multi-taskers who think they are, “multi-taskers are more easily distracted and less able to ignore irrelevant information than people who do less multi-tasking.”

It figures. In the primitive days before the Internet, people who did two things at once were thought of as scatterbrained and undisciplined. Overnight, they somehow became twice as smart and half as lazy as mere mortals.

Finally, these nerds have been exposed. As a Stanford prof put it, “Is multi-tasking causing them to be lousy at multi-tasking, or is their lousiness at multi-tasking causing them to be multi-taskers?”

Or as I would put it, “Are they annoying because they multi-task, or do they multi-task because they are annoying?”

Who knows. I wonder if the next big revelation will be that an abacus whiz can outperform a calculator king.