The technological generation: Stop rushing life

It's funny how just about everything is acceptable, even beneficial, in moderation. Enjoying a glass of red wine, taking antibiotics — perfectly harmless if not done too often. Multitasking falls in the same category. What started as a practical skill has gotten totally out of hand.

Hm. Actually, the opposite is true. The problem is nestled in our very palms.

With the increasing prevalence of gadgets that do everything but take out the garbage, it's no longer enough to walk and chew gum at the same time. We're expected to check our email, download music, navigate cross-country and form better words than our friends — simultaneously. As the distractible, clumsy owner of a cell phone manufactured circa 1980, I'm not happy about this.

Sometimes, multitasking works. Singing in the shower, for instance, should be encouraged. It shouldn't be the default approach to everything, though, but that's what it's become. When we don't give important tasks 100 percent attention, we deprive them of the effort they deserve and wind up with watered-down results. By dividing our concentration between multiple tasks, we compromise our ability to excel at any of them.

This diffusion of quality leads others to expect less from us and lowers the standards we strive to reach ourselves. Chronic multitasking leaves us unsatisfied by things that used to make us happy on their own. Whatever happened to watching football without tweeting or posting status updates after every play?

Diagnoses of attention deficit disorder among both children and adults have risen steadily over the past decade. Experts partially attribute the trend to inflated watchfulness among parents and less stigma surrounding mental health disorders, but I think the increase reveals a troubling new reality about modern life.

Kids use technology earlier than ever before, and each new gadget promises greater capabilities, inundating youngsters with more and more distractions both in and out of the classroom. Of course they have an attention deficit — there's too much to read, too many photos to tag, too many 'villes to farm and too many scowling birds to launch.

Smartphones make it nearly impossible to resist the urge to multitask, and they allow us to blend work with leisure — to the detriment of both. We can access our fantasy teams during the workday and read an email from the boss before bedtime — so we do. It may seem efficient to merge both worlds, but it's a false satisfaction. Work creeps into our personal lives, erasing any boundaries between the two.

Contrast today's lifestyle to that of generations past. Eighty years ago, families gathered around their radios to hear then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt deliver his "fireside chats" to a nation gripped by World War II and the Great Depression. To occupy their hands, maybe the mothers would knit and the fathers puff cigars, but they were fully engaged — they actively listened.

Now, such a thing seems hard to fathom. I'm not arguing against maximizing our time, but we should pick our battles. Let's aim to do as much as plausible — not as much as possible — within a time window. Giving a half-assed effort to eight tasks isn't preferable to doing outstanding work on four. Multitasking might seem like the only way to shred through daunting to-do lists, but it causes us to cut corners. If we have to revisit tasks to tidy up the edges, are we really saving any time?

The problem isn't out of our hands — it's sitting in them. The solution, then, must also be within our grasp. Remember that scene in Forgetting Sarah Marshall where Paul Rudd tried teaching Jason Segel to surf? The same lesson applies. Chronic multitaskers, take it from the quintessential stoner-surfer dude: "Just do less!"

Alissa Gulin is a senior journalism major and a former Diamondback opinion and news editor. She can be reached at gulin@umdbk.com.