Yule Heibel's Library tagged multitasking →  View Popular, Search in Google

Great essay/ speech: Heart of Darkness, excellent sheep, smiling sharks - and a take-down of multi-tasking. ;-)
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Now that’s the third time I’ve used that word, concentrating. Concentrating, focusing. You can just as easily consider this lecture to be about concentration as about solitude. Think about what the word means. It means gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input. It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube—and just so you don’t think this is a generational thing, TV and radio and magazines and even newspapers, too—are all ultimately just an elaborate excuse to run away from yourself. To avoid the difficult and troubling questions that being human throws in your way. Am I doing the right thing with my life? Do I believe the things I was taught as a child? What do the words I live by—words like duty, honor, and country—really mean? Am I happy?
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multitasking american_scholar william_deresiewicz leadership inspiration solitude

Via LibraryThing, a podcast with Larry Rosen.
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Dr. Larry Rosen's new book Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn looks at how technologies available to children today (the iGeneration) are affecting the ways they best learn. He observes children texting during class, studies the technologies they're using on their own time and applies his observations (and clinical research) to suggestions for educators and parents for how to engage students.
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"Everybody multitasks"...
"...a generation that self-interrupts a lot"...

librarything larry_rosen multitasking socialtheory kids

Here's to spreading a tendency to (as one commenter put it) "unjacking and single-tasking," and letting go of the punishing drive to multi-task. Read the article for pointers on how (and why) to stop multi-tasking and embrace single-tasking instead.
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I think it's because our minds move considerably faster than the outside world. You can hear far more words a minute than someone else can speak. We have so much to do, why waste any time? So, while you're on the phone listening to someone, why not use that extra brain power to book a trip to Florence?

What we neglect to realize is that we're already using that brain power to pick up nuance, think about what we're hearing, access our creativity, and stay connected to what's happening around us. It's not really extra brain power. And diverting it has negative consequences.

So how do we resist the temptation?
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peter_bregman harvard_business multitasking singletasking productivity

"The problem with a public-facing Twitter stream in events like this is that it FORCES the audience to pay attention the backchannel. So even audience members who want to focus on the content get distracted. Most folks can't multitask that well. And even if I had been slower and less dense, my talks are notoriously too content-filled to make multi-tasking possible for the multi-tasking challenged. This is precisely why I use very simplistic slides that evokes images for the visual types in the room without adding another layer of content. But the Twitter stream fundamentally adds another layer of content that the audience can't ignore, that I can't control. And that I cannot even see. "

web2.0 danah_boyd twitter backchannel audience participation multitasking