Did you know that today is Single-tasking Day? We have all grown so accustomed to juggling umpteen things at the same time; Single-tasking Day is an opportunity to step back and refocus on one thing at a time.

A while ago, I wrote about how I was having a hard time reading books, how my time online was adding to an alarming “distractibility.” I came across another piece that talks about the inefficiency of multitasking, particularly with media. Researchers at Stanford did a study to find out exactly what gave multitaskers their advantage. I found this shocking: the study’s lead author, Eyal Ophir, said, “We kept looking for what they’re better at, and we didn’t find it.” The multitaskers were easily distracted, did not have better memories, and could not switch easily between tasks. They were unable to filter out irrelevant information, which ultimately slowed them down. So, in fact, multitaskers DON’T have an advantage. Who knew??

That’s all I needed to read. I’m determined to spend at least today doing just one thing at a time. What do you think? Do you find that you can successfully tackle lots of jobs at once? Or do you find that you do better when you do each task in turn?