How good multitasker are you?

Test your multitasking skills.

The New York Times provided a test came out in the video that I mentioned in the previous blog post. "Test How Fast You Juggle Tasks" measures your speed when switching between tasks and when repeating the same task. The link also provides a test to measure your ability to focus when there are distractions.

This was my performance compared to other multitaskers' performance

My test result was very interesting and kind of expected. I knew that I am not a good multitasker. Overall my performance was lower than both high and low multitaskers. The higher the number, the more time it took you complete these task. After completing the test, I relearned the idea of deficiency and ineffectiveness of multitasking. Not to mention, recently  I have been resisting to do various tasks at once. I am sure that (my opinion on multitasking) did not help the test result. BUT, at least, I thought I would be better than low multitaskers. Is this bad?

According to task by task results bar graph, I put more emphasis on getting the correct answers rather than doing it quickly. I cannot juggle tasks fast enough, however, I make sure that my performance is high functional. 

I got better results for measuring my distractibility. It measures your ability to ignore distractions when performing a task. The higher your performance score, the more objects you were able to keep in short-term memory during this test. The test contains numbers of blue bars and red bars. Blue bars are the distractions and you have to memorize the location of red bars. Each test shows two different pictures of those bars. At the end of the test, a question asks whether the red bars rotated in the second pictures. I made 100 percent of the tests correctly when there were 2 distracting blue bars, while I only made 83 percent when there were 6 distracting blue bars. Another question came across in my mind. "Am I that bad of a multitasking? Will I be able to survive through this tough economy and get a job?" 

My distraction test result.

But researchers' comments at Stanford University made me feel much better. They said that "high multitaskers performed poorly when presented with multiple distractions, meaning they had trouble filtering out irrelevant information. Low multitaskers were not affected by the distraction s and could hold more items in their short-term memory."

How fast can you juggle multiple tasks? Why don't you try this and find out more about yourself?