If your idea of multitasking is watching a football game on television while texting your friends on your smartphone and checking email on your tablet, you’re not alone. In today’s technology-driven world, multitasking is an integral and necessary part of life. But are you really getting anything done effectively when you try to do many things at once? New research from Wharton marketing professor Rom Schrift and doctoral student Shalena Srna shows that multitasking is a mere illusion because it is impossible to execute more than one task at a time. Nevertheless, the perception of multitasking seems to be beneficial to performance. Schrift and Srna, who authored the paper, “The Illusion of Multitasking and Its Positive Effect on Performance,” with Yale marketing professor Gal Zauberman, shared their observations with Knowledge@Wharton.
