Multitasking overload
September 7th 2010 13:31
Signature Tune
There are 24 hours in the day, and Candace Roseo, a wife, mother and small business owner, needs every one of them.
Now that her 4-year-old daughter, Sofia, is in preschool, Roseo is out the door by 7:30 a.m., spending the next nine hours zig-zagging across northern New Castle County.
There's a good reason. Roseo and her husband, Nunzio, own BellaVista Trattoria & Pizzeria and recently added a second location in Wilmington's Riverfront Market. She spends the morning on paperwork before working the lunch shift at the Riverfront site. After that she picks up Sofia from a friend's house, then heads to the restaurant's Pike Creek location.
In between, she tries to keep up with the flood of e-mails and text messages pinging on her BlackBerry. "It beeps and it beeps and I try to ignore it, but then I look to see if it's that important or can I let it wait," she said. "I try not to be controlled by it, but sometimes I guess I don't do a very good job of that."
The demands of daily living, coupled with the instant accessibility provided by smartphones, video conferencing and other technology, mean more people are multitasking their way through the day. They tweak an office presentation while getting the kids breakfast, use their lunch break to check Facebook, and catch up with friends on e-mail while watching TV before bed.
All this multitasking may make us feel like we're making better use of our time, but research seems to suggest otherwise. A Stanford University study published last year found that people who combine activities are actually less productive at work than people who don't. Part of the problem seems to be focusing -- multitaskers are less efficient at changing direction and discerning what is important from what isn't.
"It is sort of cautionary," said Dr. David Wolk, assistant director of the Penn Memory Center in Philadelphia. "Often, when we tend to do two things at once, we don't do them as efficiently -- it might be done faster, but you have to go back and correct errors. It's not clear how much efficiency it adds
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