Instant gratification from Multitasking

I was talking with friends about the capabilities of their mobile phones and was asked:
Does your phone multitask? Can you read your emails while making a tweet?


Some people are very passionate about this, they stress that  its very important  for a phone to multitask so it does not lag when you open another app while waiting for another to load. With technology at our dispense, we are able to do more things at the same time to gain instant results. This is known as instant gratification- the inability to delay the pleasure from what he or she wants. With the powerful pull from social media platforms,instant gratification has affected us all. It influences us to instantly act on the urges to be involved in celebrity drama and be well connected on Facebook. 
Example sayings from someone with poor impulse control or high need of instant gratification are;
I want the information now!
I can't wait 4 seconds, this website has lost my business.
I'll multitask and open another 2 tabs to Google the weather and find out what Kim kardashian is doing. 


"Instant gratification is not soon enough" - Meryl Streep 
Not soon enough leads to us doing more things at the same time to save time. This has lead us to being a generation of multitaskers. Multitasking was once seen a valuable skill, but science is merging to prove the brain struggles to multitask. In his book Brain Rules, molecular scientist Dr John Medina states that 'the brain can not multitask'. This raises some social concerns about the culture of instant gratification. 

This culture influences the workplace and education systems to adopt multitasking, and even hails it as a solution to a time poor situations. However, there should be consideration of the science that is proving multitasking to be ineffective and even damaging to the brain. Todd Oppenheimer a journalist and the author of The Flickering Mind, talks about how the Multitasking Mentality  can impair the brain to ' superficially process' tasks. This means that while you are constantly task switching, you do them mindlessly without focus or a directed result.  


Multitasking = more time.

To be exact,.Dr John Medina confirms that it takes four times longer to complete a task when it is interrupted. 

When I look at my little Huewai IDEOS (cheapest android phone on the market) Im glad that it can't handle rigorous multitasking. This curbs my urges for a media fix, and teaches me appreciate the benefits of delayed gratification - also known as patience and self control. This unlike mindless multitasking can also be adopted into how I complete tasks at work.


While writing this blog post, I observed the way I work and  notice that I am a flustered mulitasker, who is easily distracted.  This blog post took me 2 weeks to finish because I was overwhelming myself by opening 8 tabs in the browser every time I got started.


So next time when you catch googling, facebooking and chatting while in a lecture - cut down on your tasks and save time and your brain. Seriously  your mental health depends on it.