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Last Tuesday I opened my laptop to draft an email to a client, looked up forty-five minutes later, and realized I had thirty-seven tabs open.
Two of them were the actual email. The rest were everything I had touched while writing it: a doc the client had sent, a Slack thread about a different project, three news stories, two unrelated YouTube videos, a wine bar in Lisbon I had thought about visiting in 2022. The email was unfinished.
I closed thirty-five tabs and went looking for what the research actually says, expecting the famous Stanford study you have probably read about. What I found was more complicated than the headlines.
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The Stanford Study, Ten Years Later
The famous study is Ophir, Nass and Wagner at Stanford, 2009. They surveyed 262 students about how often they used multiple media simultaneously, identified the top quartile as “heavy multitaskers” and the bottom as “light multitaskers”-19 and 22 people respectively-and ran them through cognitive control tests.
The heavy multitaskers were worse at filtering distractors, slower at task-switching, and made more errors on working memory tasks.
Two things about it the popular version skips. The sample is forty-one Stanford students, which is small. And replication has been mixed-at least three follow-up studies couldn’t reproduce the task-switching effect, and a 2017 meta-analysis found the distractor-filtering finding didn’t consistently hold up either.
A reader who only knows the 2009 paper has the popular version, not the current state of the evidence.
The more consolidated picture comes from a 2018 review by Melina Uncapher and Anthony Wagner-the same Stanford researcher from 2009.
They pulled together twenty-one studies and found the direction of the original effect held: heavy media multitaskers perform measurably worse on attention and working memory tasks, including when single-tasking.
The magnitude is smaller than the 2009 paper suggested. The gap is real, but not the dramatic version that circulated for ten years.
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What Task-Switching Actually Costs
The number worth holding is from a different research line-Rubinstein, Meyer and Evans, 2001. Across four experiments, they found that switching to unfamiliar or complex tasks cost more time than switching to familiar ones.
The per-switch cost is small in isolation-a few tenths of a second is the figure that comes up most often. But the math compounds.
If you switch contexts forty times an hour and each switch costs half a second to three seconds, you have lost twenty seconds to two minutes per hour.
Over an eight-hour day that is between three and sixteen minutes. The cost is not enormous. It is also not zero, and it is invisible from the inside.
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Close the Tabs
One thing to try this week. The next time you start a task that genuinely requires concentration- drafting, code, anything where you would lose ten minutes if interrupted-close every tab and app you’re not actively using before you start. Just for that one task, not the day.
Never multitasking isn’t realistic-concentration tasks are where the switching cost is largest, and those are the ones worth protecting.
Most of your tabs are open because you forgot to close the last one, not because you need them.
—Prompt N Productive—