Multitasking Can Make You Lose, By Alina Tugend

This week in Composition II, we evaluated an article about the effects of multitasking. The article, Multitasking Can Make You Lose…Um…Focus, written by Alina Tugend was published in the New York Times in 2008, and contemplates the positive and negative aspects of multitasking. Although multitasking is essential in 21st century life, studies have shown that multitasking can make you less effective. In Chapter 7, we have looked at the mental capacity of our brains, and what our brains are capable of. This chapter included multitasking, and Tugend shares very similar views to those of Morris and Maisto. They all believe, that despite our large prefrontal cortex, our brains are not as functional while doing multiple tasks, as it is doing single

During class, we were supposed to take notes, while processing what our teacher was saying, and tuning out the talking classmates. This was a daily task that many of us had completed since middle school, however it was a prime example of multi-tasking. To test the effectiveness of multi-tasking I decided to continue my note taking process on the first day as usual. On the second day, I decided to record the lecture and intently listen to what the teacher was saying instead. After lecture, I replayed the recording and took detailed notes, pausing it as I needed. Compared to my sloppy notes from the first day, that were covered in ink smears and abbreviations, my second day notes were much easier to study from. I also believe that I retained more information the second day, having only forced myself to focus on one task at a time. However, it is very obvious that multi-tasking was much more time effective. Taking the time to listen to lecture again, while pausing it for notes, added around an hour and a half onto the normal note taking time. Even though I retained much more knowledge by not multi-tasking, it would take far too long to re-listen to five lectures and take notes over them