Saving Lives, One Un-Tweet at a Time: Making Change Part 1

A recent study by Stanford professor Dr. Clifford Nass revealed that humans may be able to do it all…but not all at once. Multitasking may actually be detrimental to those that undertake it. And nothing is more emblematic of this than the tragedy that is driving and Tweeting.

If you haven’t had time to scour the B-roll of the news lately, Hollywood plastic surgeon Frank Ryan (creator of Heidi Montag 3.0) was the victim of a fatal car accident in Malibu on Tuesday. The culprit? Twitter. Reports say he was uploading a picture of his dog Jill on a sand dune to TwitPic while driving from his home, and he accidentally went over a cliff. Amateur clairvoyants have surfaced all over the nation, attempting to decode the predictive nature of this final tweet. Dog = God? Those that haven’t pulled out their crystal balls have instead taken to wishing the dog a speedy recovery. What no one seems to be doing is pointing out how foolish it was that his tweet could not wait until he wasn’t behind the wheel of a car.

My intention is not to diminish the tragedy that is the loss of a life. It’s just frustrating knowing how easily said tragedy could have been prevented. Campaign upon campaign–not to mention municipal laws–spell out the dangers of being a distracted driver. But putting down the phone, in any context, has been met with fierce resistance. We’re expected to multitask. Anywhere, anytime. Changing that mindset is hard to come by. The need to do several things at once can lead to things as trivial as lost time and as serious as the aforementioned tragedy, yet old habits apparently die hard.

Despite any conclusions you’ve come to about today’s impending question, it won’t be about the perils of multitasking, but rather the perils of refusing to change. Change is hard, and people hate it–that seems to be the general consensus when it comes to breaking habits. But some habits, like this tendency toward multitasking at inopportune times, need to be discarded. The question is: why is it so hard to change even the most trivial of tics, and how can people ultimately do so?

Sorry, dear readers. We’ve left you with a cliffhanger today (no insensitive euphemism intended). To find out the answer to this question, be sure to visit MonarMusings tomorrow for Jessica’s information on the real way to make change…