Prevalensi ditemukan meningkat pada remaja dan pekerja umur 20an. Pada pekerja misalnya, sambil ngetik laporan, terima telpon, ngirim email, terus sambil chatting  Ternyata otak kita juga punya limit untuk dapat melakukan beberapa pekerjaan sekaligus (multitasking)

Menurut Rene Marois, neuroscientist dan Kepala Human Information Processing Laboratory Vanderbilt University, masalah utamanya adalah seringkali orang berpikir bahwa dia dapat melakukan lebih dari yang dia bisa (hehe... semua orang kali ya  )

Hal lain yang dilaporkan oleh David E. Meyer, Kepala  Brain, Cognition and Action Lab University of Michigan, adalah bahwa Multitaskers ternyata lebih lambat dan membuat kesalahan lebih banyak dibanding yang tidak 

Ughh.... salah gw selama ini 

“Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information,” says David Mayer, directory of the Brain, Cognition and Action Lab at the University of Michigan. The limits of multitasking are being reported in several research papers, both published and currently unpublished, according to an article by Seve Lohr in the NY Times today.

The findings suggest that people would be wise to curb multitasking behavior when working, studying or driving a car.  Experts advise checking email once an hour, at most.  Avoid songs with lyrics, instant messaging, televisions shows, which hamper performance.  Using a cell phone while driving, even with a hands-free set, is a bad idea. (A delay of even one second, at 60mph, can be fatal.)

 Martin Westwell, deputy director of the Institute for the Future of the Mind at Oxford University, says that after completing a recent study, he checks his email much less often.  Rene Marois, director if the Human Information Processing Lab at Vanderbilt, says he now turns off his phone when he’s driving.

A recent study at Microsoft found that workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks.  A co-author of that study, Eric Horvitz, ssys, “I was surprised by how easily people are distracted and how long it took them to get back to the task.  If it’s this bad at Microsoft, it has to be bad at other companies, too.”

Obviously, the end result is lost productivity and wasted resources, both financial and human.

While technology is, indeed, a useful tool for coping with information overload, it needs to be managed.  You can use the technology to supplement your brain and keep track of more things.  Up to a point these resources can help you be more productive.  But a paper written by Erik Brynjolfsson of the Sloan School of Management at MIT, finds that “beyond an optimum, more multitasking is associated with declining completion rates and revenue generation.”

In a recent update of earlier research, Basex, a business research firm, has concluded that 28 per cent of professional and office workers’ time was spent on what they deemed “interruptions and recovery time” before they returned to main tasks.

Horvitz, of Microsoft, says we live in this Wild West of digital communications right now.

But with conscious management and self monitoring, we can keep ourselves on track.