Overload

David Kirsh, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California-San Diego, says cognitive overload is a way of life at the office now.

"Workers can turn the ringer off the phones, possibly close doors, auto-filter e-mail, and personalize search engines, and ask people to honor privacy, but blocking out sacred time segments or sealing ourselves off from outside contact, even e-mail, isn't a real option with most organizations."

Gloria Mark, a UC-Irvine professor, has been studying attention overload and multitasking among workers in a financial-services office. So far, she's found that the average employee switches tasks every three minutes, is interrupted every two minutes and has a maximum focus stretch of 12 minutes.

Multitasking and angst about its necessity have been studied for several decades, and Roman philosopher Publilius Syrus himself uttered in 100 B.C., "To do two things at once is to do neither."

Yet, multitasking is constant now. We do it because it is expected, but also because we believe we can — sort of. The truth, says, David Meyer, a Michigan psychologist and cognitive scientist who has run several studies on the subject, is we don't and can't do it well. We can if the tasks are simple and virtually automatic (think walking and chewing gum at the same time) but true, effective, efficient, meaningful multitasking is akin to jamming two TV signals down the same cable wire. You get static, not high-definition.

the constant pinging of your e-mail can be like the drip-drip-drip of water torture.