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Multitasking a bad habit
Multitasking is a bad thing: author rosen 412. Please cite for me
Multitasking a bad habit
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In the essay “The Myth of Multitasking,” Christine Rosen searches for the truth behind multitasking. In her essay, the structure allows readers to understand how important multitasking is in the modern day. Then the essay she talks about the negatives about a high-multitasking lifestyle. Rosen mentions various of doctors, specialists, and psychologists to support her claim that multitasking isn’t as good as people think but it can be detrimental. Rosen mentions multitasking is dangerous, but also for people's overall well-being. The essay starts with a quote in one of Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son. Chesterfield offered the following advice: “There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once,
but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.” Rosen mentions that Chesterfield’s focus was “not a practical way to structure one’s time, but more of a mark of intelligence”(Rosen). Due to Rosen, she talks about how there is so much going around us all the time, it becomes a challenge to stay focused on one thing at a time. Towards the middle of the essay, Rosen talks about the subject of changing our brains. To better understand this, Rosen gives examples with studies of neurologists and psychologists. She talks about the different studies and statements these neurologists and psychologists have hypothesized. At the end of the article, Rosen addresses the problem of multitasking: attention. She states that because of attention, it’s a test on one’s ability to pay attention on one thing or another. The “Myth of Multitasking” takes a deeper look at this phenomena, and some dangers. The structure of this article was an easy format and easy read for the readers. The intended audience of this article would be those who are in their late teens or thirties. Even though they are more prone to the multitasking problem. Due to it’s easy structure, the readers understand the evidence presented in this article. Rosen doesn’t use complex vocabulary which helps the younger audience understand. By targeting a general audience, she is bound to get different feedback. Rosen presents her argument with a quote by the noble, Lord Chesterfield. Chesterfield’s words provoked thought with Rosen. She gives a speech about the recent shift of our culture. This shift was about the new technology that us people were getting at the time. From this many people can relate to this shift in time. Many of these gadgets would have many options for us to multitask. Rosen doesn’t only glorify multitasking but she takes a turn and starts relating multitasking with driving. She then states that people who are distracted by their phones and driving have lower IQ scores. Her arguments are made clear when quotes Dr. Edward Hallowell to show that such skill is a myth. And how is can be hurtful when one tries to attempt to develop a skill and we minimize productivity in our lives. She makes clear right away about how she feels. From here, Rosen begins a new section of her article with a different subject that supports her claim. In the five paragraphs, Rosen uses logos, pathos, and ethos. She wants to appeal many different types of people and try to persuade the readers. Her reasons come from many different sources. She quotes many researchers and professionals on this topic of multitasking to support her case.
As human beings, it is becoming more of a second nature to us to multi-task. As the world is technologically advancing more and more every day, there are becoming more distractions. Social-media is flourishing, reality TV show ratings are going up, and humans even unintentionally check their phones every two minutes. In this day of age, multi-tasking is proving to promote inefficiency rather than productivity.
In the article, “Multitasking Can Make You Lose…Um…Focus,” Alina Tugend centralizes around the negative effects of multitasking. She shows that often with multitasking, people tend to lose focus, lack work quality, have an increase in stress, and in the end she gives a solution to all these problems. Tugend conveys her points by using understandable language, a clear division of subjects, and many reliable sources, making her article cogent.
Students may easily lose their attention and concentration with easy access to such incredibly rich store of information. With such new technologies as television, internet and social networks, people nowadays tend to multitask more often as they have easy access to a large amount of information. However, such easy access may sometimes be a distraction. Study “Your Brain on Computers” reports that heavy multitaskers perform up to 20% worse on most tests compared to performance of light multitaskers. Working efficiency of people, who multitask, is claimed to be significantly lower. The same is with concentration. (Crovitz 353) As a result, they are not engaged in working process. Students tend to be easily distr...
Today we live in a society where everything is seconds away from us. With the advances and affordability of quality technology, you would be hard pressed to find someone without a smartphone, laptop, or tablet, possibly all at the same time. Because of the accessibility we find that, in our tech-savvy culture, multitasking has not just become an art form of sorts, but rather an expectation. In the article “Multitasking Can Make You Lose…Um…Focus,” Alina Tugend sets out to explore the idea that although multitasking appears to show productivity, it could be doing the opposite. Throughout her article, Tugend uses studies done by neurologists and psychologists to show how in a world that sees multitasking as an expectation it has actually made us less efficient. She proposes, through studies, that although you might be working on multiple tasks it is as if you’re playing tennis with multiple balls (Tugend, 725).
Though there are some positive effects, the adverse impact of technology on education has been extraordinary. The technology community has worked hard to bring useful technology into our classrooms, all with good intentions to broaden our knowledge. With these good intentions also came about unwanted side effects such as distraction and disruption in the classroom. I can clearly remember many of my teachers yelling at us to put our cell phones, iPods, and iTouch phones away especially during lecture and exams. The yelling was not without just cause, students cheated with their devices along with updating their Facebook pages during class too.
People live in a society that encourages getting as many things done as quickly as possible. Whether they realize it or not, multitasking as become a part of their everyday lives. They perform multiple tasks at the same time in order to save time. They use multiple electronics to take more in all at once. Multitasking can seem to be the more efficient way to handle things because people can spend the same amount of time on several tasks as opposed to just one. However, they do not stop to think of the amount of effort it takes the multitask and the consequences that can come along with it. Several experiments have been performed to determine just how detrimental multitasking can be. Attempting any form of multitasking
Paul has four main reasons why multitasking is a bad habit of a person when doing school homework. The first reason is doing assignment will take longer to accomplish because there are many distraction activities occurring. Paul uses the example of students using cell phones during class, where if you are paying attention to your phone, then you are not paying attention in class. The result causes students to re-examine their assignment to help themselves familiarize the material. The second reason is students can be tired and sleepy, which can make more mistakes on their assignment as they multitask. The third reason is students lose memory on the assignment they were given which divides their attention from doing other things at the same time. The fourth reason is when we are distracted, the information we received is processed differently making ourselves unable to concentrate. The last reason is multitasking can decrease student's school grades. According to the Rosen study, students who spend fifteen minutes on Facebook will have a lower grade. As comparison learning was more effective in the past, resulting in a new generation filled with
This experimental investigation has to do with how human’s attention work. It is based on a replication of the well-known “Stroop Effect” carried out on 1935 by John Ridley Stroop. The aim of this experiment was to demonstrate how hard it is for a person’s attention to be divided in different tasks, by making the participants read a series of three stimuli which consisted of: 1) words of colors in black ink, 2) words of colors in their actual font color, and 3) color words with different ink, where the participant read the font instead of the word present. The research hypothesis supposed that selective attention is as easy to be performed visually as well as audibly. The controlled variable of the experiment were the black ink color words, while the second stimuli was considered to be experimental variable. There were two independent variables that were the color words corresponding to their color and the number of mistakes each participant made in each category. The dependent variable was the third stimuli, where the participant read its font rather than the word presented. The experiment was completed within a group of sixteen participants from an age range of 13-16 (eight girls and eight boys in total). The average time and mistakes in each variable was the following: 9.28 seconds with no mistakes, 9.53 seconds with one mistake, and 25.53 seconds and an average of two mistakes. In conclusion, the observations were that it took much more time in the last stimuli, which was the one that divided attention into two tasks. Implication findings would be the modicum amount of participants in the experiment.
In Alina Tugend’s “Multitasking Can Make You Lose…Um… Focus,” the columnist lists the possible cons from multitasking. As Tugend adversely states, “…we are required, or feel required to do more and more things in a shorter period of time.” (715) Rebutting Tugend’s point of view, multitasking has been recognized as one of the most refined ways to get ahead not only at work but at home as well. Simultaneously completing responsibilities has the potential to prevent procrastination, allows you to deal with distractions, and productivity
In “The Myth of Multitasking”, Christine Rosen argues that multitasking has become the normal way of doing things for many people and there are many side effects from multitasking. Many people believe that multitasking is a skill, but multitasking is in fact just dangerous. Multitasking has changed today’s society because more people are texting and driving, distracted for longer periods of time, cannot retrieve information, and attention spans are weaker. If more people took their time and paid attention to how they complete a task the first time then things could get done quicker instead of trying to do too many things at one time. In conclusion, multitasking is based on how much a person pays attention while doing a task and in today’s society is it harder for people to pay attention for long periods of time.
Technology is prevalent in our personal and professional lives. Everywhere we go; there are multiple screens and multiple distractions. How is productivity when being inundated with information and devices? There seems to be some bragging rights associated with multitasking, however many would argue the opposite. The following examines how multitasking negatively influences personal and professional productivity and how we should make changes to reduce digital distractions.
When living our everyday lives, it is almost impossible to ignore the bings and buzzes of electronic devices. Whether it is used for work or for personal use, social media has become a major part of our lives. In the article “The Myth of Multitasking,” Christine Rosen mentions how electronics seem to be background noise and can be avoided, at first. Yet, this technology will have made its way into people’s daily activities and it can no longer be avoided. Rosen calls this cycle the “electronic din.” Adolescents are now finding that this addiction to technology is to be expected in their everyday life and is seen mostly through social media. The electronic din and use of social media has caused many people to spend hours of their day staring
Technology has always been improving over the decades, and now it has improved to the point where it’s a part of a human being’s life. People can’t imagine living without technology anymore nowadays, and especially college students who are always on their phones and laptops during lectures. That leads to what is known as multitasking, which is the ability to take care of more than one task at the same time. Multitasking has been popularized by students, and specifically college students, who think that they are actually successful at doing it. Unfortunately, according to Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, after testing students who think they are brilliant at multitasking, results showed that they are terrible at every aspect of multitasking; consequently, it is not successful.
Human brains consist a grey matter (unmyelinated neurons) that contains most of the brain's neuronal cell bodies. This part of the brain controls things such as muscle control, memory, decision making, and “multitasking.” Numerous amounts of people consider multitasking (the handling of more than one task at the same time by a single person) a beneficial phenomenon, but surprisingly multitasking actually may be altering our brain. Studies show that people who constantly multitask are lowering the amount of grey matter in their brains. People are harming themselves by overwhelming their brains with more information than they can handle.
The popular belief that multitasking is efficient, and the new-age generation is hard wired for multitasking, is highly misguided. Truth is, effective multitasking is an oxymoron. It’s not uncommon to see a person texting while walking down the street, listening to music while doing homework, or staring at a computer screen with multiple tabs and windows open. It’s hard not to multitask, given the amount of work people have to do and the non-stop information being thrown at them. People will do it as a force of habit; they think it will help them accomplish more tasks in a shorter time period. More often than not, they find it being the complete opposite. The brain can only process one activity at a time; instead, it switches gears, which takes time, reduces accuracy, distracts, and hinders creative thoughts. So, the real question should be: is multitasking actually worth the time? No, multitasking negatively affects people in all aspects of their life.