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researchers have tried to assess how humans are coping in this highly connected environment and how “chronic multitasking” may diminish our capacity to function effectively.

Clifford Nass, notes that scholarship has remained firm in the overall assessment: “The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They’re basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking.”

Below are more than a dozen representative studies in these areas:

If you are like me, you interact with a flood of information, online networks, and people everyday.  To handle it all, we multitask.  Unfortunately, it's easy to get off track or drift off course while multi-tasking.  

the act of multi-tasking -- responding to an e-mail/tweet/phone call, adding a new post/picture, etc. -- becomes an end in itself, rather than a means to an end.

How do you build a scan for online multitasking?  Build a checklist. List the online tasks you want/need to keep up with.    Organize the list from the most important task to the least.  Repeat important tasks in the list if the intervening tasks take you away too long from that important task. After you go through enough scans to clear the deck, take a break to work on items that require long term thinking. 

I aruge that we are always multitasking and sometimes we do it more adeptly than others and it is incumbent on us to take our own internal inventory and decide what we are doing well and what we are not. And then to ask why.

The point is too many new technologies at once are distracting.   So is too much life.  So is too much anything that is new, cumbersome, non-routinized. 

But there's been so much punditry about "multitasking," as if Twitter is the only thing that makes our life's tasks multiple.   As I've said many times, heartache (emotional overload) and hearburn (physical ailments) are far more distracting than email . . . and they make it harder to learn new technologies too.

I aruge that we are always multitasking and sometimes we do it more adeptly than others and it is incumbent on us to take our own internal inventory and decide what we are doing well and what we are not

The problem is that I am having to learn everything from scratch, all the time, all at once.

Is it the technology or the stream of non-stop decision-making that doesn't seem to stick to a 9-5 workday but follows you home from the office, at night, on weekends, on summer vacation?  

We can talk about attention training, multitasking, the dangers of distraction.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it"

Infotention