Interesting research that is applicable to the education industry. Conventional advice to graduate students and junior faculty is not to multitask but to focus on one project at a time to avoid errors and burnout. I advise my students to always multitask because the context of the error-prone academic work essentially demands multitasking. Reading and writing, listening to lectures and taking notes, getting stuff published while teaching and engaging in community service are the job descriptions. Do not take my words for it, read Charles Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, especially the appendix on scholarly craftsmanship: Mills prescribes that you should have many different projects at different levels of completion all the time. When I recommend to junior colleagues that my rule of thumb is to have ten projects in the pipeline at any one time, to avoid being bored and to improve productivity, they tend to roll their eyes and tell me to get a life. Then the scales drop when I remind them that undergraduate students are expected to write five scholarly term papers every semester, making ten every year. If undergrads can do it, yes we can do it better. The athletic programs illustrate this better for academics: the stars learn to train daily to run, jump, throw, kick, block, catch and switch from offense to defense almost seamlessly. Strategic planners in education are not fully aware of lessons from the sporting fields and therefore tend to ignore athletics when planning for academic excellence where team spirit is as valuable as in sportsmanship. In academics as in sports, 'true multitasking' is a sinequanon.
Biko
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