Focus vs Multitasking: The Real Cost of Switching Tasks
Multitasking is ineffective, task switching leads to diminished focus and increased cognitive load.
Contributions
Every accepted correction to this page is recorded with the exact change, so readers can see how the page improved over time.
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A review of this article on multitasking and focus found that most of its research citations, including several classic and heavily cited studies, checked out accurately. Four smaller issues were found: a real statistic was misattributed to a professional association rather than the researcher who actually said it, a real study was described using the wrong research methodology, a widely repeated but unverifiable precise recovery-time figure was presented as if it came from formal published research, and a vague, unattributed citation could not be traced to a specific study.
What the page claimedThe article attributed a well-known '40 percent productivity loss' statistic to the American Psychological Association as an institutional estimate, when the figure actually comes from psychologist David Meyer and is merely hosted on the APA's website. It described a real 2001 University of Michigan study as a neuroimaging study, when it was actually a behavioral study measuring reaction times, and omitted one of its three real authors. It cited a specific '23 minutes and 15 seconds' recovery time from an interruption, attributed to Gloria Mark's research, a figure that could not be verified in her real peer-reviewed work, which instead found that interrupted workers tended to compensate by working faster rather than taking longer to fully re-engage. It also cited an unattributed 'Journal of Experimental Psychology' study without any author or year, too vague to verify.
What was correctedThe article now correctly attributes the 40 percent figure to David Meyer's own statement, describes the 2001 University of Michigan study accurately as behavioral research measuring reaction times and includes its third author, describes Gloria Mark's real research findings while noting that the specific 'twenty-three minutes' figure often associated with her work traces to media interviews rather than her peer-reviewed publications, and rephrases the vague citation to avoid implying a single specific, unverifiable study.
Why: Web searches confirmed that the large majority of this article's citations, including the well-known Stanford multitasking study and the University of Utah driving research, matched the real published record precisely. A small number of specific details, an attribution, a research methodology, a widely circulated but unverifiable statistic, and an overly vague citation, needed correction, which was done while preserving the accurate content around them.
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