Work and Study Habits in the Interconnected Age: What It Means for Businesses of the Future

In the context of continuous connectivity, big data, and information over-load the purpose of this study was to investigate the work and study habits of contemporary students. This project was an exploration of how students order their environments and manage their work and how this affects their academic performance. The main finding is that most students work in distracting surroundings and engage in many activities while studying. However, the more activities they engaged in, the worse their academic performance. The finding is consistent with research showing that using two (or more) cognitive processes simultaneously has a negative impact on both the effectiveness and the efficiency of carrying out tasks. Moreover, many students are not aware of the negative effects of distraction, or fool themselves that they can actually multitask because we also found that the most distracted students were the least good at predicting their own results. There was also a big difference between men who trusted to their personalities and luck for results and women, who took a more strategic approach and were more likely to achieve the results they predicted.