Multitasking, often presented as a virtue of the digital age, is turning out to be what many people initially thought it was—a productivity-damaging distraction. One expert, Jonathan Spira, chief analyst at Basex, estimates that interruptions created by multitasking cost the U.S. economy nearly $650 billion a year. Companies as large as Microsoft are feeling the financial effects.

The problem stems from the fact that human brains were designed to work efficiently on one task at a time, using a hundred billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections. We can multitask if necessary, but we function better on a single task. 'Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes," said David Meyer of the University of Michigan (Steve Lohr, 'Slow Down, Brave Multitasker, and Don't Read This in Traffic," The New York Times, March 25, 2007).