Many forms of social media—especially on phones—create hard-to-ignore distractions that make it difficult to stay focused on listening when someone else is speaking. For example, when you’re sitting in class and receive a text message, what do you do? If you’re like a lot of students, you stop listening to your professor so you can read and respond to the message. This situation is not unique to texting. You may also be tempted to check Twitter, Snapchat, or Instagram; play online games; or use other apps while chatting with a friend, family member, or coworker. However, the research on multitasking is clear: people who multitask—that is, shift their attention back and forth between many different things at once—suffer a number of negative outcomes. For example, students who habitually multitask have difficulty focusing their attention on any single task for more than five minutes at a time (Rosen, Carrier, & Cheever, 2013). They also suffer substantially lower overall GPAs than do students who limit their multitasking (Juncoa & Cotten, 2012).

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Multitasking also has a devastating effect on listening. Habitual multitaskers are poor listeners and are more likely to mishear messages or miss them completely (Ophir, Nass, & Wagner, 2012). This is true even if they think they are skilled multitaskers; people who consider themselves good at multitasking are just as bad as everyone else when they try to listen while multitasking (Ophir et al., 2012).

Why does multitasking so dramatically impact listening? Because it disrupts all aspects of the listening process. Think about it: because you fail to hear, understand, interpret, and evaluate information correctly in the first place, you can’t accurately remember or competently respond to it after the fact. In simple terms, if you multitask, you won’t be able to listen well; and if you don’t listen well, you can’t recall and respond well. This is especially crucial for settings such as college classes and workplace presentations, in which you receive lots of important information very rapidly—all of which needs to be remembered.

Fortunately, a simple solution to this dilemma exists: resist the urge to multitask while listening. Whenever you’re in an environment in which you need to be able to hear, understand, interpret, evaluate, remember, and respond to information, turn your phone off (don’t just put it on vibrate or silent), put away other work, close your laptop or shut off your tablet, and actively focus on the person who is speaking.