If you have not yet registered, booked your flights, and cleared your docket, now is the time to do it. The American Judges Association Annual Conference in New Orleans is fast approaching. One of the educational programs will focus on how judges can become better decision makers. One of the challenges that we face is for a variety of reasons there is constant pressure to multi-task, but for any occupation and particularly for judges, it is a risk. An excerpt from a recent article highlights the issue with this warning: don’t muti-task on the bench nor smoke marijuana……..or maybe if you have to make a forced choice between multi-tasking and smoking marijuana litigants will get a better judge if you just light up:

challenges to the ethos of multitasking have begun to emerge. Numerous studies have shown the sometimes-fatal danger of using cell phones and other electronic devices while driving, for example, and several states have now made that particular form of multitasking illegal. In the business world, where concerns about time-management are perennial, warnings about workplace distractions spawned by a multitasking culture are on the rise. In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.” The psychologist who led the study called this new “infomania” a serious threat to workplace productivity. One of the Harvard Business Review’s “Breakthrough Ideas” for 2007 was Linda Stone’s notion of “continuous partial attention,” which might be understood as a subspecies of multitasking: using mobile computing power and the Internet, we are “constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing.

For the full article see:

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-myth-of-multitasking.

Seriously, don’t smoke marijuana on the bench, but do come to New Orleans.