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THE
MOLECULE OF MORE
as you focus on the email. The person you’re talking to can tell. You’re
obviously not giving him your full attention, and you miss important
details. Instead of increasing your efficiency, “multitasking” decreases it.
Aza Raskin, an expert on user experience and the lead designer for
the Firefox 4 web browser, gives an example. Spell aloud, letter by letter,
“Jewelry is shiny” while at the same time printing your name.
How long
does it take? Now spell aloud, letter by letter, “Jewelry is shiny” and
then, after you are done with that, write your name. How long did that
take? Probably about half as much time as “multitasking” did.
You also make more mistakes when you try to multitask. Interrup-
tions of only a few seconds, the amount of
time it takes to switch to
your email program and back, can double the number of errors you
make on a task that requires concentration. It’s not just the distraction
that causes the mistakes; switching back and forth consumes mental
energy, and fatigue makes it harder to concentrate. Still, people do it,
especially people who work with computers.
A study from the University of California, Irvine,
in collaboration
with Microsoft and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tracked
the work habits of people who spent most of their day online. The aver-
age amount of time they spent on one task before switching to another
was only 47 seconds. Over the course of the day they switched between
tasks more than four hundred times. Those who spent less time before
jumping to something else experienced higher levels of stress and got
less work done—if for no other reason
than that they repeated the
“switch tasks” maneuver four hundred times instead of only once after
each task was completed. In addition to decreasing productivity, high
levels of stress also cause fatigue and burnout.
THE HIGH COST OF LIVING IN THE FUTURE
Living our lives in the abstract, unreal, dopaminergic world of future
possibilities comes at a cost, and that cost is happiness. Researchers
from Harvard University discovered this
by developing a smartphone
app that prompted volunteers to provide real-time reports of their
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HARMONY
thoughts, feelings, and actions as they went about their daily activi-
ties. The goal of the study was to learn more about the relationship
between a wandering mind and happiness. Over five thousand people
from eighty-three countries volunteered to be in the study.
The app contacted the participants at random times to request
data. It asked the volunteers, “How are you feeling right now?” “What
are you doing right now?” and “Are you
thinking about something
other than what you’re currently doing?” People answered
yes to the
last question about half the time, no matter what they were doing. All
activities produced the same amount of mind wandering except sex,
which was very good at keeping people’s attention. In every other situ-
ation, though, thinking about other things happened so frequently that
the researchers concluded that a wandering mind, what scientists call
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