W. Lloyd Williams

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a space for all the aspects of my life...

The Problems of Multitasking

The *New York Times* recently featured an [article](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/business/25multi.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin) compiling the results of several new studies looking at distractions and multitasking. The following confirms the necessity of stopping the distractions:

>In a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites.

>“I was surprised by how easily people were distracted and how long it took them to get back to the task,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft research scientist and co-author, with Shamsi Iqbal of the University of Illinois, of a paper on the study that will be presented next month.

Merlin Mann of 43folders has [linked to several resources](http://www.43folders.com/2007/03/26/nyt-multitasking/) on the myth of multitasking.

By trying to multitask we slow down our minds processing time and the results take longer to achieve.