Experience has been instructing
me, teaching me that a minimalist view of work is perhaps the healthiest
approach to combating stress in the work place.
David Sanbonmatsu, Ph.D., Professor,
Social Psychology, Utah University, lead researcher of a study that wants to
find out which personalities were more likely to try to do two tasks at once.
They're keenly interested in people who talk on the phone or text while
driving, since there's plenty of data that even using a hands-free phone boosts
the risks of accidents.
For some time now, researchers
have been making the case that people who drive while using phones drive as
badly as people who are legally drunk. Yet some people persist in thinking they
can handle it. Why is this?
The Utah
research speculated that multitaskers would be more apt to test high for traits
like risk-taking, sensation-seeking and impulsivity. Their hunch was correct!
They asked student volunteers
whether they used cell phones while driving, and whether they were good at
multitasking. Then they tested the students' multitasking ability by asking
them to solve math problems while remembering random strings of letters.
They found that the people who
multitasked the most in real life—the impulsive risk-takers—were actually much
worse at juggling tasks than people who rarely drove while phoning.
Even worse, these demon
multitaskers thought they were terrific at it, though the cold, hard data
proved they weren't.
"People don't multitask
because they're good at it," says Sanbonmatsu, "They do it because
they are more distracted. They have trouble inhibiting the impulse to do another
activity."
"People sometimes think
multitasking means greater productivity. That's not what the findings in the
literature say at all. Often people
multitask because they can't focus on the task that's most important to them."
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