Stop everything else when you read my blog.

Christine Rosen recently wrote in The New Atlantis about the myth of multitasking. Any internet junkie should recognize the phenomena she describes:

In the business world, where concerns about time-management are perennial, warnings about workplace distractions spawned by a multitasking culture are on the rise. In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.” The psychologist who led the study called this new “infomania” a serious threat to workplace productivity. One of the Harvard Business Review’s “Breakthrough Ideas” for 2007 was Linda Stone’s notion of “continuous partial attention,” which might be understood as a subspecies of multitasking: using mobile computing power and the Internet, we are “constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing.”

Ahh, continuous partial attention. So that's what it's called: the hour spent clicking about on Facebook, periodically checking Gmail, Blogspot, and university e-mail, just in case. On a purely anecdotal level, I feel a much greater sense of accomplishment after several hours at one task (or even an uninterrupted series of tasks) than I do if I've been flitting from site to site in the process.

(Walter Kirn covered similar territory at the Atlantic almost a year ago. Nicholas Carr provided further musings on technology and the brain in a more recent issue.)