Multi Tasking or Distracting | Athletic Leadership

What’s so fascinating about your feet?

It’s amazing how ignoring others has become so in vogue and acceptable. Do you actually WANT poor posture, to ignore friends, to walk into cars, to miss opportunities, to hinder your learning?

Welcome to the world created by genius tech guys. “Simon” the smartphone was invented at IBM in 1992, and, today, we all follow what “Simon Sez” to do: Focus on the next twitter feed, check the latest Facebook post, read an email, text a friend. This is all in lieu of talking to friends in our presence, holding doors for strangers and engaging at the dinner table.

And tech multitasking has done us one more evil: It’s preventing our students from learning.

The inability to focus on one thing for more than a few minutes means that students never deeply absorb information.

The latest studies have shown that with computers allowed in classrooms for note taking, the epidemic is growing. The temptation to have email open or a Twitter feed visible in a classroom, dooms learning. And even if you don’t have YOUR computer open to Twitter, if you see someone else’s flash a message, the damage is still done — you are distracted, studies show.

Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University – Dominquez Hills, thoroughly researched the study habits of students and is concerned about the trends he saw, as published a year ago on slate.com.

“Evidence from psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience suggests that when students multitask while doing schoolwork, their learning is far spottier and shallower than if the work had their full attention. They understand and remember less, and they have greater difficulty transferring their learning to new contexts. So detrimental is this practice that some researchers are proposing that a new prerequisite for academic and even professional success—the new marshmallow test of self-discipline—is the ability to resist a blinking inbox or a buzzing phone.”

The “marshmallow test” he referred to was a 1960s and early ‘70s study done at Stanford, where preschoolers were offered a choice between one marshmallow now or two marshmallows, if there were able to hold off eating the first marshmallow for 15 minutes. The follow-up studies showed that youngsters with the discipline to wait scored higher on SAT tests and in other life measures later in life.

Today, resisting the marshmallow is easy. Resisting the lure of a text tone is super hard, if not impossible.

But the reality is that we CHOOSE to allow ourselves to become distracted by what we allow into our environment.

“ ‘Young people’s technology use is really about quelling anxiety,’ Rosen contends. ‘They don’t want to miss out. They don’t want to be the last person to hear some news, or the ninth person to ‘like’ someone’s post.’ Device-checking is a compulsive behavior that must be managed, he says, if young people are to learn and perform at their best.”

Dictionary.com says that the word “multi-tasking” had it origin in the early 1960s. when a computer does two things at once, that’s multi-tasking. When a human does it, it’s failure, according human performance expert Jim Loehr, PhD.

“We define multi-tasking as completing two or more parallel tasks simultaneously,” Loehr said. “The fact is human beings cannot split their focus. The human energy system is binary. You are either focusing on something or you’re not. It is a complete misnomer that human beings must multi-task to achieve extraordinary results in today’s business world. The reality is just the opposite. Multi-tasking is the enemy of extraordinary. One is much more likely to make mistakes when one is trying to focus on more than one thing at a time. If an individual has 10 balls in the air at one time, 9 of them are in complete free fall. Multi-tasking dumbs us down and sends a tragic message in human relations. That message is you are not important enough to get my full and best energy.”

Now, the choice is ours.

Do we walk into busy streets or hold doors for ladies in wheel chairs?
Do we leave our phone in our pocket or lay it on the table, with one eye focused on it?
Do we make to-do lists to prioritize our life or try to juggle 10 things in our head and never focus on the book we’re reading?
Do we allow our children to have multiple screens during study time, such as the TV in the background and the phone on the table, or require focused study, void of distraction?

The key to success? TECH BREAKS, the Rosen says.

Enjoy Facebook, enjoy Twitter – for 15 minutes. Then turn it off.

Study hard for 30 minutes and then ‘reward’ yourself with another tech break and a snack.

Follow that with 45 minutes of study before the next break. Begin to condition yourself to live longer between “tech hits.”

And not to be forgotten is the age-old practice of focused attention. Sit quietly, while focusing on your breathing. When your mind wanders from the breathing, refocus it. Repeatedly training your mind will serve to relax you and enlarge your ability to focus, just like going to the gym will enlarge your muscles.