The balancing act of student life
What are you doing as you’re reading this article? Eating, riding the bus, or pretending to listen in class, perhaps? Like it or not, multitasking is an integral part of college life.
Jason Balls, a sophomore in public health, said he believes multitasking is very essential to being a successful college student.
“With all your different classes, just trying to stay on top of homework [takes a lot of multitasking],” he said.
“It’s definitely important to survive in college,” Holly Lewis, a senior majoring in liberal arts, said, “I find it beneficial to exercise and study at the same time, so I try to do something that I can read a book while doing.”
Marcus Godfrey, a senior in accounting, said he thinks he multitasks a lot.
“For a man, yeah. You have to as a college students.
Balls agreed, saying, “It’s hard for me – I don’t know if it’s just the whole ‘male’ thing that I can’t multitask, but my mind tends to wander.”
Some people say that women are better multitaskers, but Steve Lehman, a professor in educational psychology, disagrees.
“It’s dependent entirely on which domain you’re talking about. Women are generally seen as better multitaskers because they’re more focused on relational skills, so when placed in a social situation, they can do more things than men because their social skills are more automated.”
Men, he said, are better multitaskers when it comes to something like sports because they tend to practice it more.
Overall, though, the ability to multitask differs from person to person.
“It depends on personality,” Lyons said, “and that person’s ability to do several things at once.”
Lehman explains that while the brain can really only focus on one task at once, other tasks become automated allowing the brain to focus on that subject. This also allows the brain to switch its focus between multiple subjects.
He gives the example of walking down the sidewalk. While walking down the sidewalk may not seem like a very complex action, people who have had serious brain injuries have a hard time simply walking down the sidewalk because their brain has not automated that complex task, making it impossible for the person to do anything else but focus on walking, he said.
However, multitasking can be taken too far.
In a 2001 study, CNN found multitasking to be counterproductive, because the brain wastes several tenths of a second in switching over from one task to another.
This “time cost” as researchers Joshua Rubinstein, Ph.D., David Meyer, Ph.D., and Jeffrey Evans, Ph.D., call it, varies from task to task based on the difficulty of the tasks at hand. Although this time may not necessarily have a substantial effect when students are trying to eat and read, the time lost is critical when it comes to driving and talking on a cell phone.
“You’re more likely to have an accident,” Rubinstein said in the article.
Caroline Ronér, a senior in human resources disagrees, saying multitasking is unavoidable.
“I think that anything you do is multitasking. Eating, homework, errands, walking to class, talking on the phone, anything,” she said
Some students still find themselves in over their heads with everything they’re trying to do.
“[I get overwhelmed] all the time,” Godfrey said. “Last semester is a perfect example with work and trying to take too many classes. It gets to be a problem.
“You’re trying to do homework while cooking dinner and then you put in a load of laundry and then you realize the food’s still in the oven and it’s burnt,” Godfrey said, “Your mind’s always racing.”
Lyons agrees that the brain can get overwhelmed when it tries to handle too many things at once.
“People get fragmented,” she said, “so sometimes you need to just sit back and focus.”
-limarc@cc.usu.edu