By Jim Brinson and Kasie Brinson
Faculty, School of STEM at American Public University

Are Multitaskers More Effective Learners and Workers?

In a 2014 survey of the most desired employee “soft” skills, 57% of employers reported seeking multitaskers. Presumably, multitaskers are more efficient at task completion, but is this actually true? Given multitasking’s increasing rank as a desired skill, it’s important to understand its implications and consequences for learning and working in our modern techno-world. Long before the current technological revolution, research suggested limits on how well two or more concurrent tasks could be completed.

Does Multitasking Increase Performance?

In today’s world, one shifts focus frequently to cope with information inundation. Constant shifts in focus place considerable demands on cognitive processes and resources, leading to a decrease in performance. Additional research confirms this performance reduction, which suggests that focusing on a single primary task results in better resource direction and adequate processing, encoding, and storing of tasks. Uninterrupted processing yields minimal errors with respect to information retrieval.

The addition of subsequent tasks, however, results in division of these resources and fragmented processing. The quality and quantity of stored information decreases because of this disrupted encoding. Consequently, information retrieval from this interrupted processing (multitasking) results in significantly more errors and decreased performance.