I used to multitask while reading every single night, and for a long time I genuinely thought that made me efficient. Textbook in my lap. YouTube playing. WhatsApp notifications sliding in from the top of my screen. I was covering ground, I told myself. I was getting things done. At that point, I took a mid-semester test and made a 51 percent and was unable to remember anything I had studied in three weeks. My 51 percent was the point that I ceased to believe that my strategy was doing so great.
The thing with studying that is combined with other activities is that it is productive. You are doing something. The time is flying by. It is the turning of the pages. However the grades are not in relation to the time and that disparity is disorienting and de-motivating when you do not know why it is there. Until I began reading about the actual process of how the brain processes attention, I did not understand why.
Why Trying to Multitask While Reading Actively Works Against You
The initial fact that researchers will inform you about the brain is that it does not in fact carry out two mental activities simultaneously. When you attempt to multitask as you read and at the same time follow a video or answer messages, what your brain is doing is alternating between those two activities. Every switch is time and thinking energy consuming. Every change of readers also breaks the understanding chain that your brain has been forming in whatever you were reading.
Gloria Mark is a professor at the University of California Irvine who studied interruptions and their influence on knowledge work over a certain period of time. Her study discovered that, on average, it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to come back to the same level of concentration as you previously were prior to the interruption, following a meaningful one. It is not a negligible figure. When you are interrupted three times an hour, you might not get turned on to any real concentration whatsoever during the whole session.
A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that interruptions lasting as few as 2.8 seconds were enough to double the error rate in cognitively demanding tasks. Two point eight seconds. That is shorter than the time it takes to glance at a notification and look back at your book. Yet even that momentary break in attention measurably damages performance on tasks that require sustained thinking.
Working memory is limited. When you divide your attention across two tasks, you are not giving each one half your brain capacity. You are giving each one a fraction of the capacity needed to process it well. In studying, that fractional processing produces surface understanding that evaporates before the exam.
The Study Habit I Had That Felt Like Work but Was Not
As I assess myself with sincerity, I believe that I employed the habit as a way to multitask when reading as way of avoiding the pain of hardship. It is painful to read a piece of work that is really difficult and to spend time with the confusion until you can comprehend it. The phone was a relief valve. The moment a passage got hard, I had a very easy way out.
This pattern is more common than most students realise. The discomfort of not immediately understanding something is one of the main reasons students reach for their phones during study. The phone provides instant, easy stimulation that contrasts favourably with the slow, effortful business of genuine comprehension. What the students are unaware of is that this is exactly where the learning occurs as they are getting out of the situation that is causing them discomfort.
It takes time when sitting with a challenging passage long enough to struggle it into comprehension, inquiring yourself as to what you think it is, relating it to things already known, that is the way information becomes lasting knowledge. Whenever you leave that process by distraction, you disrupt the very process that you are attempting to approach.
The Single Change That Started Everything
I did not overhaul my entire study system overnight. I made one change. Before every study session, the phone went face down in another room. Not in my pocket. Not on my desk in silent mode. In another room. The research on why this matters specifically is striking. A study from the University of Texas at Austin found that the mere presence of a smartphone on a desk, even face down and switched off, reduced available cognitive capacity compared to having the phone in a different room entirely. The brain allocates some of its resources to actively not looking at the phone. Remove the phone, and those resources return to the task.
The first week of not trying to multitask while reading was genuinely uncomfortable. The urge to check messages was persistent and strong. I noticed how restless I became when I hit a paragraph I did not immediately understand. But I stayed in the sessions. And at the end of each one, I noticed something I had not experienced in a long time. I actually remembered what I had read.
Related Articles
Spaced Repetition Study Method: My 15-Day Experiment With It
How I Study When I Dont Feel Motivated
What the Research Says About How Memory Forms
Memory formation is not a passive process. Information does not simply transfer from a page to your long-term memory because you looked at it. Retention requires something called elaborative encoding, the process by which your brain connects new information to existing knowledge structures and processes it at a deep enough level to make it retrievable later.
This encoding process requires sustained, undivided attention. When you multitask while reading, you interrupt elaborative encoding before it can complete. The information enters working memory, but it does not get the processing time needed to form durable neural pathways. You have read the words. You have not encoded the meaning. This is why students who have read a chapter three times sometimes still feel like they know nothing about it going into an exam. The issue is not the number of exposures. It is the quality of attention during each exposure.
Dr. John Medina, a molecular biologist and author of Brain Rules, describes attention as the gateway through which all learning must pass. You cannot learn what you do not attend to. This seems obvious when stated plainly, but it has a direct and important implication. Every minute you spend on material with divided attention is largely a wasted minute from a learning standpoint, regardless of how it feels in the moment.
What Changed in My Grades After Six Weeks
Six weeks after I stopped multitasking, I sat another exam in the same course. I scored 77 percent. That is a 26-point improvement on the 51 I had scored before. The total amount of time studying during those six weeks was less than in the preceding period. The lessons were reduced. They were inferior in number. Yet each session was actually concentrated and the profits of every hour of concentration were very high compared to the profits which I had been making in my divided marathon sessions.
I do not want to make this sound like a magic cure, as it was not. The basis was focused attention but I also altered the manner in which I went through material, which I will address in the following paragraph. You cannot build effective study habits on a base of divided attention. When you stop the habit of trying to multitask while reading, you create the conditions in which every other study technique can actually work.
Conclusion
The habit of trying to multitask while reading is one of the most common ways students work against their own learning without realising it. Attention is not just helpful for study. It is the mechanism through which study actually produces learning. Dividing it does not mean you cover more ground. It means the ground you cover does not stick. The solution is straightforward even if it takes consistent practice to implement. Remove the distractions. Commit to a defined block of time. Sit with difficulty. That discomfort is where the learning lives. The grades will follow.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Is background music regarded as multitasking during study?
Avoiding instrumental music that lacks lyrics usually does not generate an equivalent attention competition as a spoken audio or display media. The process of instrumental music in the brain follows a different route than language and therefore, does not have the tendency to interfere with the process of reading comprehension as a podcast or TV show does. It has been observed by many students that the reduction in attraction of other distractions by a steady, low-tempo instrumental music actually happens because it provides a stable sound environment. Lyric music is another thing and indeed tends to lower the understanding, especially during reading and writing assignments.
2. But what about the case when I really cannot study when I am silent because of my environment?
One of the practical solutions is noise-cancelling headphones with instrumental music or white noise. Another one is studying in a library or a silent cafe. Other students would be glad to find out that they are studying in a common quiet environment like a reading room at the university, this would provide them with just the right amount of social responsibility to suppress the desire to pick up their phones. Reduce random stimulation is the objective, and not necessarily the attainment of complete silence.
3. What is the effect of the distraction issue on various types of tasks?
Activities which demand specific understanding or critical thinking such as reading scientific articles, solving mathematics or researching on legal texts are the most vulnerable to distraction. Tasks that require recognition as opposed to recall and narrative reading exhibit smaller performance decreases due to mild distraction. This has the effect of making the study time when your concentration matters the most is the same time that the urge to multitask is the worst as the subject matter is more challenging and the break of distraction that soothes is more attractive.
4. Do you have the capacity to regain your concentration after months and months of multitasking habits?
Yes, and neuroscience of neuroplasticity helps to prove this. The brain develops new connections with the practice. One of the trainable capacities is sustained attention. The vast majority of individuals who engage in regular focused practice report observable enhancement of their capacity to remain in deep focus within two to four weeks. The uncomfortable experience during the first few days is an indication that the brain is adapting to a new activation pattern, not a lasting constraint.
5. Does multitasking have any advantage whatever in terms of academics?
In processes where the task is truly automatic and cognitive processing is unnecessary, there may be a combination of mildly parallel activities with no significant loss. One of them is walking and listening to a recorded lecture. Another way of reviewing flashcards is on a train. The most important difference is between the tasks, which demand the active work of the cognitive processes, and the ones that can be carried out automatically. Reading to understand is categorically in the first category and it must never be used with any other task that is cognitively efforting.
6. What are the differences in how dyslexic students are affected by distraction during reading?
Dyslexic students tend to use more cognitive load in reading text than their neurotypical counterparts due to the extra decoding load and the understanding load. This implies that their mental capacity is already stretched when reading. This difficulty is made worse by Distraction since there is less spare capacity to consume. Distraction-free reading conditions are most useful with students with reading-related learning differences.
7. Does time of day influence single-task focus effectiveness?
Circadian rhythms produce a significant impact on the cognitive performance and attention capacity. The vast majority of individuals become most alert and at their highest executive functioning in the late morning, normally between 9am and noon. This is the most appropriate time to insist on understanding tasks. During afternoon concentration is inclined to decline and somewhat pick up towards the early evening. It is possible to improve the effectiveness of focused sessions by organizing your work on reading your most challenging texts toward your personally optimal alertness schedules as opposed to reading when you are low energy due to timing.