Is Multitasking More Harmful Than Marijuana?
That's a strange title, don't you think? To be honest, I wouldn't recommend either smoking pot or multitasking (although the former is much worse). Let me explain why I chose such an odd heading.
According to a report from the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, multitasking can cause more (temporary) harm to your mental performance than smoking pot.
In the study, people who were constantly distracted by email and messages while working on tasks performed noticeably worse, and the researchers compared the drop to the effect of smoking marijuana. Guess which came out worse?
Yup, the constant multitaskers. This does not mean that drugs such as marijuana don't hurt you. They certainly do, and no one should use them. But the finding does give you something to think about. When you do several things at the same time, you lose a large part of your ability to concentrate. And as you probably know, concentration is the key to good study results.
In short: stay focused on what you're doing, and don't get distracted by doing a dozen things at once. Do you still want to know how to multitask? I sure hope not.