“Unfortunately multitasking is one of the surest ways to fritter away time. Our efficiency plummets when we try to juggle even two simple tasks at the same time, as Yuhong Jiang, a psychologist at Harvard University, demonstrated in an impressive experiment. She asked students to identify both colored crosses and geometric shapes, such as triangles and circles. At first, this task seemed laughably simple to the young academics at this elite university. But they changed their minds when they realized how slow they were and how many mistakes they were making. The participants needed almost a second of reaction time to press a button when they saw colored crosses and shapes at the same time. But if the students were asked to spot first the crosses, and then the forms, the process went almost twice as quickly. Other series of experiments have shown that multitasking also makes more errors slip in.”

– Stefan Klein in The Secret Pulse of Time

“The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.”

– Lewis Mumford