A recent Stanford study shows that people who do things simultaneously are paying a big mental price. They get distracted by everything and show less capability to accomplish tasks. This study is especially focused on media multitaskers, i.e. those people who browse, IM, write emails simultaneously.

This reminds me a blog I read earlier this year, which described the issue in a more impressive way: multitasking is even worse than taking drugs. The article mentioned, “Multitasking is bad. Research suggests that you not even lose the time you spend multitasking, but you get temporarily dumber by about 10 IQ points. This is just by checking email and doing some instant messaging. Many similar tests suggest that marihuana users get about 4-8 points less. “