How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

But Aren’t There Exceptions?

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But Aren’t There Exceptions?
Unlike our brain’s deliberate system, the automatic system 
is
capable of parallel
processing. So if one of your tasks truly requires no conscious thought from you,
it’s possible to do something else at the same time. Driving a car is often cited as
a good example of an automatic task, which is why we’re able to chat with a
passenger at the same time as driving along quiet stretches of road where
nothing surprising happens.
But as soon as that simple task becomes more complex—if, say, another car
pulls out suddenly in front of us—driving is no longer an automatic task. It
requires conscious attention from our deliberate system. And at that point, we
can’t chat 
and
react safely to the changing situation in front of us. That’s why
one in every five serious crashes is caused by a distracted driver, and why police
reports suggested that traffic accidents fell by 40 percent in Abu Dhabi and 20
percent in Dubai when BlackBerry’s networks in those places failed briefly in
2011.
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There is some evidence that a tiny, single-digit percentage number of people
have brains that seem to work differently. David Strayer, a psychologist based in
Utah, has been looking at the very rare phenomenon of “supertaskers,” and they
do exist. But frankly, you’re either one of these people or you’re not, and the
stark truth is that most people—even readers of this book—are not. Multitasking
more frequently doesn’t make you better at it, either. In fact, habitual
multitaskers have been found to take 
longer
to switch between tasks than
occasional multitaskers—perhaps because they’ve lost the knack of focusing for
any length of time.
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And ironically, research suggests that people who are most
confident of their ability to multitask are in fact the worst at it.
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