Hi Mr Motwani,
Your multitasking article has been published, but there were a few issues we need to discuss, so that they don’t recur.
Headline has been changed from “Multitasking Messes Up Your Life” to “Why Multitasking is a Bad Idea”. Kindly see why.
Also see how the mistakes below are elementary; you could just as easily have spotted — and fixed — them yourself, if only you had edited your work before submitting.
<strong>2. Multitasking Is Not a Time-Saver</strong>
It is common belief that multitasking saves time, or at least we can at least pack a load of work into a period of time. However, experts say it is an illusion. The NYT quotes a study: “In a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment websites. I was surprised by how easily people were distracted and how long it took them to get back to the task,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft research scientist and co-author, with Shamsi Iqbal of the University of Illinois. If it’s this bad at Microsoft,” Mr. Horvitz added, “it has to be bad at other companies, too.”
Kindly be sure when you tell the readers where the quotes start and where they end. In the graph above, the quote cannot be starting at “In a recent study…”. It, instead, should have started at “I was surprised…”, where it is not starting, according to you.
Mr Motwani, the point is we should not be discussing these elementary things. All our writers double up as sub-editors when they submit their copies; the copy should be in publishable condition.
There were other issues in the rest of the piece. We have fixed the mistakes this time, but it will not be possible for us to put in so many efforts into your articles in future, I’m afraid.
Otherwise, it was a good read. So I would say keep up the good work, but cut down on the elementary mistakes.
Harpreet Bhagrath