By Barbara Rowley

The day the dog started barking whenever I flipped open my cell phone, I knew something was wrong. I’d had hints before, of course: Kids who didn’t feel listened to, work details I couldn’t remember, even a seriously stubbed toe when I tried to push a laundry basket across the floor with one foot while holding two trash cans in my arms.

But when the dog objected to his daily walk being turned into a strolling phone meeting, it dawned on me that my terrific get-it-all-done, multitasking lifestyle—an approach I took great pride in—had somehow soured.

I’ve always been busy and ambitious, the kind of person who keeps mental track of every task accomplished throughout the day. But during a hectic decade raising kids while trying to keep my career and life afloat, my multitasking inclinations morphed into a cross between a parlor trick—look at me!—and an extreme sport.

Folding clothes, talking on the phone with an editor on a headset, and nursing a baby all at the same time transformed household drudgery like laundry into a type-A accomplishment. I started to push the limits, and each new technology helped me along. Why not watch a movie and answer email on the same screen? Why not check voice mail with one ear while listening to my daughter read aloud with the other? I became the kind of person who would never do one thing if I could possibly do two—with three and four as my ultimate goal. My husband would come home having simply worked a job, while I wrote articles and took care of babies and—get this—made homemade bread to boot.

The price to pay
But despite my self-congratulatory attitude, I knew things weren’t perfect. As I hurriedly skimmed rather than read books and magazines, I had the sense that focusing on multiple tasks was starting to short-circuit my attention span. I even had moments of clarity when I saw that my much-cherished efficiency looked a lot more like, well, rudeness. But I wasn’t quite sure what to do about it. Life had to go on, didn’t it? There was too much to do for me to devote all my attention to one thing.

Or was there? Even as I continued to sort my mail while driving, an increasing amount of research began to surface showing that this kind of behavior was not only (obviously) dangerous, it wasn’t even saving me much time.

It’s true: Studies at major universities have started to chip away at the very attributes of multitasking that the super-busy, super-efficient hold most dear. This research suggests that multitasking pushes the brain to work in ways that end up making it slower and more error prone than good, old-fashioned focusing. Multitasking also impedes our ability to remember or to learn.

But if it doesn’t make us more efficient or better, why does multitasking remain so appealing?

According to Edward Hallowell, MD, author of Crazy Busy: Overstretched, Overbooked and About to Snap (Ballantine, 2006) and a psychiatrist who specializes in ADD/ADHD, people multitask not out of a desire for efficiency but because it has become a self-perpetuating habit. Like most habits, Hallowell says, multitasking is an easy thing to get hooked on, and his