Professor Clifford Nass

In the last few hours, I knitted about 20 lines of a new scarf, started this blog post, answered emails, caught up on some broadcasts of Shark Tank, and got dressed for a dinner date. I enjoy multitasking because It makes me feel like I am moving several projects forward at the same time.

I always thought I was good at multitasking. Then I recently read the obit of Stanford University Professor Clifford Nass in The New York Times. Nass was known for writing books about human nature. One of his favorite topics was analyzing multitaskers. He claimed that most multitaskers do not concentrate, analyze, or feel empathy. Nass was a pioneer in researching how humans interact with technology.

I’m sorry I didn’t know Professor Nass because I would have debated some of his findings, even though he spent more than 25 years studying people during the computer age.

One of his most publicized pieces of research was a 2009 study on multitasking. He and his colleagues discovered that people who frequently juggle computer, phone, or television screens didn’t necessarily display special skills at efficiency nor an orderly memory.

His group claimed that most multitaskers were terrible at every aspect of multitasking. The exact words they used were, “Multitaskers are terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized; and they’re terrible at switching from one task to another.”

Dr. Nass found that people who didn’t usually multitask were actually better at it than those who did it frequently. He argued that heavy multitasking shortened attention spans and the ability to concentrate.

Dr. Nass was the co-author of “Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship” and “The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships.”

The ironic part of Professor Nass’s obit was that he was only 55 when he died. He suffered a heart attack after he returned home from a hike. It makes me wonder if he was trying to do too much.