But, wait. Should it be breaking news that a single person can’t juggle knives and explain quantum physics while polishing off an artichoke?

Breaking news and a shock to the researchers themselves, as it turns out. Originally, the team of researchers, whose findings are published in the Aug. 24 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were trying to find out what unusual cognitive gifts multitaskers possessed that made them so successful at multitasking.

They’re still looking.

“Multitaskers were just lousy at everything,” said Clifford I. Nass, a professor of communication at Stanford and one of the study’s investigators. “It was a complete and total shock to me.”

Initially suspecting that multitaskers possessed some rare and enviable qualities that helped them process simultaneous channels of information, Professor Nass had been “in awe of them,” he said, acknowledging that he himself is “dreadful” at multitasking. “I was sure they had some secret ability. But it turns out that high multitaskers are suckers for irrelevancy.”

I’ll be the first to admit I have my moments where I’m in the middle of 5 things all at the same time.  I’ll also admit that I’m usually on the computer doing something while on a phone call (checking email, looking things up, etc), and I KNOW that I’m not doing either task (talking on the phone or reading on the internet or email) particularly well, yet I can’t help myself.  I’ve been more aware of my multitasking over the last few months, making an effort to only have one thing in front of me at a time, but I have to say it is REALLY hard.  Multitasking is a really hard habit to break.  I wonder if that in a world where multitasking is supported, encouraged, heck even forced, we’re putting ourselves in a position to have to work more in order to make up for mediocrity.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Why Multitaskers Stink at Multitasking (blogs.wsj.com)
• The Mediocre Multitasker (nytimes.com)
• People who multitask are often bad at it: study (ctv.ca)

I was listening to a Venture Voice with  Scott Heiferman of Meetup.com this morning, and I had a thought about connecting the dots.  When asked how or why he started meetup.com, he talked about being in NYC in 9/11 and the need for in person interactions inspired him, but the thing that I found interesting was when he went back 10 years to when he first arrived in NYC in 1994.  He said  when he came from Iowa, he looked all over the place for ways to find and meet people in the city who had similar interests.  I think this is how everyone feels when they first move to a new city, but it is clear that this was a problem Heiferman cared about way back then.  He could have never known (or maybe he did) that 7-8 years later (I think) his interest in solving that problem for himself, would lead to  building a platform that would solve it for so many people.  It reminded me of this quote from Steve Jobs Stanford commencement speech:

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Something about this all makes me excited.  I think it’s something about how the problems you care enough about to seek solutions today, could be the start of something very big.