Listening well can be nearly impossible when your attention is divided among many important tasks. Multitasking—attending to several things at once—is often considered an unavoidable part of modern life. We routinely drive, walk, cook, or tidy up while listening to music, talking on the phone, communicating on social networking sites, or watching television.

We may believe we’re giving fair attention to each task, but research shows that our ability to attend to more complicated chores suffers when we multitask. That’s because our ability to focus is limited—we end up shifting our attention between various tasks, which decreases our efficiency and accuracy (Wallis, 2006). If you grew up surrounded by television, PlayStations, and iPods, you may be able to multitask better than people who grew up without such distractions. But regardless of age or experience, heavy multitaskers are less able to switch tasks efficiently and tend to be distracted by irrelevant pieces of information (Ophir, Nass, & Wagner, 2009)

So what are realistic remedies for this listening barrier? One remedy is discipline: vow to silence your cell phone, log out of your social networking site, and refrain from texting for a specified period. Another remedy is to be mindful and considerate of others. You may think it’s no big deal to text a friend during a classmate’s presentation in your human communication course, but if the roles were reversed, you might take offense or wonder if you were boring your listeners (Mello, 2009; Stephens & Davis, 2009). This point goes for interpersonal interactions, too—if you’re texting Rodney or playing Words with Friends with Denise while having lunch with Alex, you might be sending Alex an unintended message that you don’t value his company.