Are you paying attention?
Article Type: Literature and insights From: Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Volume 26, Issue 3
A few weeks ago I was at an academic seminar and, since I arrived fashionably late – well, very close to the beginning of the session - I slipped into a seat at the back of the room. What this position afforded me was a view like the one I sometimes take quite deliberately when I have a guest lecturer in one of my course topics.
When you sit at the back of a lecture theatre, you can often see which students are using their laptop computers for study and which ones are surfing the net or playing games, and so forth. One of my colleagues is used to waiting for about fifteen minutes into his guest lecture before announcing that I am at the back noticing this, and you can imagine the sudden shift in screen images that ensues. But are academics any different? I imagine you know the answer;increasingly, they are the same.
Many of us like to think that we are maximizing our productivity when we switch on our iPads during a meeting or a conference paper, and if we momentarily stray from taking notes to checking our emails to following a link somewhere to another link and another, then we may assure ourselves that are up to the job because we can effectively multi-task, no? It all depends.
Some say we can talk and drive, or knit and watch TV (well, maybe you), or some such combination of activities without failing at either. The point there seems to be that one part of the paired jobs, at least, is relatively undemanding. In Australia during 2011’s National Science Week, a series of tests examined how effective we are at multi-tasking (ABC Science, 2011). Although there is more work to be done in the study, they already indicate that we can often manage two tasks reasonably well but fail dismally at three, that multi-tasking is both less satisfying and produces a worrying drop in functional IQ, and that those who multi-task a lot rate their ability highly despite actually being poor performers. Peter Bregman, in his Harvard Business Review blog (Bregman, 2010),also argues that stress results from trying to do too many things at once. Does all of this sound familiar?
Such claims are not new. Rogers and Monsell (1995) declared their worries in 1995, the American Psychological Association (2006), and Clifford Nass of Stanford University expressed concerns in 2009 (Nass, 2009). Can we maintain this Attention Surplus Disorder in the face of such evidence, and given the suspicion that we are not really the wonderful workers we would like to be? As Douglas Merrill says:
When you’re trying to accomplish two dissimilar tasks, each one requiring some level of consideration and attention, multitasking falls apart. Your brain just can’t take in and process two simultaneous, separate streams of information and encode them fully into short-term memory (Merrill, 2012).
What we call multi-tasking is often merely task switching, in which we make more errors, and as “research shows that people can attend to only one cognitive task at a time” (Weinschenk, 2012).
This all made great sense to me. I had it keenly in mind the next time I went to a half-day forum in which, by the second paper, I had run out of interest. I have whiled the time away previously in similar situations by scribbling in a note-pad. This time I had my new iPad to play with and I used it to outline two new research projects and a short story. Multi-tasking? I do not think so. Task switching? You bet!
In this issue, Sherrena Buckby nails the experience of being at an accounting conference, with all its ups and downs, and Claire Lewin posits a refreshing approach to assessment, but will it catch on? Your own creative contributions can be submitted via ScholarOne (see below). Your email correspondence is always welcome, of course, at: steve.evans@flinders.edu.au
Acknowledgements
Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal (AAAJ)welcomes submissions of both research papers and creative writing. Creative writing in the form of poetry and short prose pieces is edited for the Literature and Insights Section only and does not undergo the refereeing procedures required for all research papers published in the main body of AAAJ.Author guidelines for contributions to this section of the journal can be found at: www.emeraldinsight.com/products/journals/author_guidelines.htm?id=aaaj
Steve EvansLiterary Editor
