How Does Multitasking Affect Your College Education?
While watching your favorite bingeable show, you speed read tomorrow’s required reading, take an online quiz, and revise a paper.
Since high school, you’ve been able to multitask pretty well.
At least, you think you’re multitasking.
The reality is that completing college homework and sitting through long lectures can be challenging. Why not make completing homework and sitting through lectures somewhat bearable?
Sending your friend a quick text, checking your social media for a brief moment, etc. help you get through the day.
While juggling these tasks may seem pretty harmless, you may find otherwise as a result of reading this post.
Learn what multitasking is, what the results of multitasking are, and how you can learn to work smarter not harder below!
What is multitasking?
Although this term is thrown around liberally, you may not understand what people generally mean by “multitasking.” Multitasking is the idea of dealing with one or more task at the same time.
When someone says they are good at multitasking, that person believes that they are skilled at doing multiple tasks simultaneously like cooking and reading or typing and talking.
In actuality there are some tasks in which you can seemingly multitask. These tasks are usually physical activities that require little mental effort like vacuuming a floor.
In reality, the term “multitasking” is an oxymoron, because the human brain cannot manage more than one task simultaneously.
Dr. Susan Weinschenk from Psychology Today suggests the term “task-switching” be used in place of “multitasking.” She explains, “research shows that people can attend to only one cognitive task at a time. You can only be thinking about one thing at a time. You can only be conducting one mental activity at a time.”
Assistant Professor Saraswath Bellur from the University of Connecticut adds to this thought: “Humans have limitations on their cognitive capacity. Our resources are limited. So the moment we pay attention to one thing, it makes it that much harder for us to process something else.”
Multitasking is a mythical term, because the human brain cannot complete multiple task simultaneously.
“Task-switching” is a more accurate description of how the human brain functions, because your brain focuses on one task or another and not two or more tasks at the same time.
What are the results of multitasking in college?
There are many results of multitasking, only some of which this post will discuss. However, the general view is that multitasking has more negative than positive results.
1. Multitasking results in lower grades.
In a study by the University of Connecticut, researchers discovered that “[college] students who multitasked while doing homework had to study longer, and those who frequently multitasked in class had lower grades on average than their peers who multitasked less often.”
You may be thinking that this idea only applies to college students who do poorer in their college classes regardless, but this is not the case.
An article titled “The Need to Minimize Distractions” published by the University of Michigan states, “research into how we learn increasingly shows lower academic performance among students who task-switch during class and study, regardless of the students’ general academic ability.”
If you are aiming to maintain or improve your grades, know that multitasking will not help you reach your goal.
Whether you are doing more than one task during class or while completing homework, multitasking will hurt your chances of earning good grades.
2. Multitasking decreases your productivity.
In the article “The Need to Minimize Distractions,” the author states:
“When you’re shifting between two activities that both require you to think, you’re really task-switching and your brain is not designed to do this well. It is estimated that shifting between tasks—even when that shift takes only fractions of a second—can cost as much as 40% of a person’s productivity!”
A study by Rubenstein, Evans, and Meyer suggests that the more complex a task is, the more time a person spends.
For example, eating a meal with a friend is more likely to require more time than eating by yourself, because you are not likely talking and eating when eating alone. But if you were to study for your biology class while in your English class, what would normally take you an hour to study might now take you almost an hour and a half.
Rather than cutting down on your homework time, multitasking can almost double the time you spend in total.
Texting, checking email, talking, and even eating may increase the time spent on your already lengthy hours of homework.
3. Multitasking increases your stress.
This point is more of a logical outflow: the more time you spend in class and homework, the less time you have for other things that help fight stress like sleeping, socializing, and exercising.
Many studies connect a lack of sleep, little to no exercise, and little to no social life with stress.
Being busy may make you feel successful or adult-like, but in reality being so busy that you “have to” multitask is probably a sign that you need to say no to extra tasks.
You can only juggle a limited number of responsibilities, so choose wisely.
With an overall rise in mental health issues among college students, you need to decrease—not increase—your likelihood for experiencing stress.
If you want less stress, say no to multitasking.
How can you stop the bad habit of multitasking?
Multitasking can actually be slightly addicting. In an article for Forbes, Shani Harmon and Renee Cullinan share two ways in which multitasking can be an addiction: multitasking triggers dopamine (a motivational chemical in the brain) and multitasking helps us feel as if we are getting more done.
So how can you rid yourself of this bad habit?
1. Use paper notes.
Laptops and tablets can be a tremendous resource in the classroom, but the reality is that many students (and sometimes teachers too) lack the self-control and discipline to stay on task while using a laptop or tablet.
With desktop notifications and text messages popping onto your screen, you are more likely to get sidetracked by other task items.
Rather than trying to discipline yourself to ignore these notifications, consider removing this distraction altogether by taking notes on paper.
While this may seem time-consuming and frustrating at first, you will find that using pen (or pencil) and paper can help you to stay focused in class and while completing homework.
In addition to helping you focus, a study by Mueller and Oppenheimer revealed that even when only taking notes on a laptop, paper note-taking resulted in a better performance on assessments based on mental concepts.
Mueller and Oppenheimer explain, “whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.”
Before making a judgement call, genuinely try note-taking with pen and paper. See what works for you. You may be surprised with what you find.
2. Remove electronic devices from your view.
Connected with taking notes on paper is removing the distraction of electronics.
Smart watches, tablets, phones, laptops, etc.—they often are the biggest obstacles keeping you from getting things done.
While these devices are simply tools and not inherently evil, they provide repeated opportunities for distraction.
If you find you are exceptionally tired, stressed, unmotivated, or anxious, consider taking a break from using your electronics during class or while working on homework. Go a step further and remove them from your view.
If you have your phone on your desk, you’re more likely to check a text. If you have your smartwatch on your wrist, you’re more likely to check a notification.
Consider putting your devices somewhere where you will not be able to see the screen light up or hear them vibrate when you receive a notification.
If you carry a backpack to class, place your phone in a zipped, interior pocket of your bag. If you study in the library, close your laptop and place it out of arm’s reach (if possible).
While this tip may not be a permanent solution, removing electronic devices from your view will likely help you push through the busy times of the school year like finals week.
3. Break up tasks into smaller steps.
If you regularly feel overwhelmed and struggle to get things done, you likely struggle with knowing how to manage projects in your college courses.
Before quitting or crying in despair (no shame here because I cried all the time in college), try to break up your project into small steps.
For example, in one of the courses I taught, the students had to present a 6-8 minute informative speech. While this may sound basic or simple to you, this task was incredibly overwhelming to students.
In order to help them be successful, this assignment included 3 checkpoints: an overview and coaching session on the informative outline, a mini-speech including only the introduction and the conclusion, and lastly the full speech.
Even with this speech broken into three checkpoints, many students would find themselves overwhelmed. What many students failed to do was work ahead.
These students would often wait until only a day before or the night before the overview and coaching session of their outline to start researching. Sometimes they could manage to pull off a C-level outline, but they would often send me a panicked email asking to switch topics.
This kind of an assignment requires at least three or more days of working ahead for a college freshman.
If a freshman student spent 30 minutes to an hour each night, their likelihood of completing an average to good outline increased dramatically. In my experience, this student is much more likely to discover significant problems or pressing questions with enough time to make adjustments.
This article may sound anti-technology, but in reality it is anti-multitasking.
While technology usually increases your ability to task-switch, ultimately you are the one choosing to task-switch.
Refuse to divide your focus and work to complete one task at a time well!
