The death of multi-tasking?

The people who multitask the most are the ones who are worst at it. That's the surprising conclusion of researchers at Stanford University, who found multitaskers are more easily distracted and less able to ignore irrelevant information than people who do less multitasking.

"The huge finding is, the more media people use the worse they are at using any media. We were totally shocked," Clifford Nass, a professor at Stanford's communications department, said in a telephone interview.

- Excerpted from the Washington Post (emphasis mine)

One of the reasons that I canceled cable is the hope of decreasing the amount of multi-tasking that I do. Of course, the whole reason that this is getting posted now is that I'm procrastinating from reading a wonderfully-boring 237 page document. (Which is at least slightly more readable than the recent 500ish, 600ish, and 700ish page documents that I've been working through).