Ben Parr

“There’s clearly a tendency for people to attempt multiple, simultaneous—as much as they can—activities,” said Dr. Adam Gazzaley, director of neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco.3 But research shows that our propensity for multitasking and distractions is a bad thing. According to UC Irvine professor of informatics Dr. Gloria Mark, once you are captured by a distraction, it can take up to twenty-three minutes to get back on track.4 And since the average person succumbs to distractions an average of every three minutes, it can be difficult to escape.5 It’s even worse if you are a multitasker. You might think a chronic multitasker would be more adept at switching between tasks, but you would be wrong. A recent study by Stanford professor Eyal Ophir found that “heavy media multitaskers”—those who consumed a large amount of media content—were not only more susceptible to irrelevant stimuli, but they were also significantly slower when it came to switching between tasks.6 Another study, from the University of Utah, found that people who identified as “strong multitaskers” were in fact the least capable multitaskers of the 310 subjects they tested. Heavy multitaskers are far less capable of inhibiting distractions than those who identify as light multitaskers.7”
― Ben Parr, Captivology: The Science of Capturing People's Attention