Multitasking Essay Samples

Christine Rosen in her essay “The Myth of Multitasking” argues that extreme multitasking has an adverse effect on the economy. Rosen directly relates decline in workplace conductivity to multitasking. Multitasking influences workplace productivity in the following ways two ways. One, fall in a person’s IQ can be attributed to multitasking. This is due to the constant interruptions one experience in the workplace including receiving call or checking and replying to emails. Fall in IQ due to interruptions is twice as much as IQ fall due to smoking marijuana. Therefore multitasking poses a grave threat to productivity in workplace and consequently takes a toll on the economy. Secondly, when workers are distracted in the workplace, a significant occurrence when multitasking, a considerable amount of time is lost during switching of tasks. It is inevitable for workers to take time to recover from interruptions.
If an employee was performing one task the whole day, the time lost when switching between tasks would be saved. Additionally, when one is faced with two or more tasks the brain takes some time before it decides which task to perform first. This is an indication that apart from time lost during switching of tasks, there is some more time lost when the brain decides what task to complete first or the order to perform the multiple tasks. Extreme multitasking in leads to a condition referred to as ‘infomania’. Workers are often scanning through events, contacts and for opportunities in an attempt not to miss anything. This results in ‘continuous partial attention’ where the worker cannot completely dedicate his attention to a particular task. The result is that none of the tasks is perfectly done as opposed to if the worker had dedicated all attention to one task. Through this evidence, Rosen supports her argument that multitasking kills the economy.