I’ve been finding that maintaining a fairly accurate todo list has helped me concentrate on finishing tasks and avoiding “multi-tasking”. I really like Hiveminder, an online todo list manager. It’s really easy to enter tasks – you can just type something like “Post article about multitasking on bloc [due Wednesday][blog]” to create an item that is due the next Wednesday and tagged “blog.”. You can even use this syntax over IM, which I’ve found really helpful for capturing requests that come in throughout the day but then turning my attention back to what I’m working on. Stanford study: Media multitaskers pay mental price
People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found.