The “Myth of Multitasking”.
We think we can multitask…..we are wrong.
When we try to do multiple things at the same time…
- Like attending a virtual meeting and having an email conversation with someone….
- Like watching TV while surfing the web….
- Like reading one’s smartphone while having a conversation….
- Like texting while walking down the street….
…we think we are good at doing those two things at once….but we are not.
The brain doesn’t actually multitask, at least not the way we think it does.
That’s why when we are on a virtual meeting we have probably all had the experience of, at least once, being asked for input only to have to admit that we didn’t hear the question and could the asker please repeat it. We have all probably had the experience of having a conversation while reading something and answered a question that wasn’t actually asked…our brain filled in some random blank with information that wasn’t offered. We have all been reading something in a book, on the screen, while someone talks in the background or the TV is on …and then we realize that we’ve read and re-read the same sentence/paragraph/page three times and don’t have a clue what it says.
It is impossible to focus on two things at the same time and be effective at either.
I had a conversation with someone about this, and the response I got was basically that they are younger and therefore better at multitasking.
No, you’re not, you just haven’t realized yet that you aren’t actually doing either job well.
What happens isn’t multitasking, it’s switching. Your brain switches gears to focus on the other thing, then back. Think of our attention and focus like a volume control….when we start paying attention to something and comprehension kicks in, the volume dial on that topic is turned up and it’s all we can mentally “hear”. Then another topic interrupts and our brain tries to pay attention to that….so it has to turn the mental volume down so that the volume on the second tune can be increased. It takes time to dial the volume on the first tune down, and then more time to ramp the volume on the other tune up….you can’t play both tunes at full blast and make sense of either, so we have to dial one down and the other up, and that takes time.
That mental time during that switching is lost time and lost brain power.
Multitasking is the supposed ability to do multiple things simultaneously, but what we are really doing is just switching mental tasks quickly, and it’s not sustainable.
And when we task-switch:
- According to research, we can lose up to 40% of our productivity when we switch between cognitive tasks vs. focus on one task at a time.
- Even having the opportunity to multitask (or task-switch) also causes cognitive damage that may be permanent. The cognitive losses may even be greater than the losses that come from smoking pot. (Which may or may not be what you’re going for, we just wanted to make sure you knew.)
- Task-switching (we all know it isn’t really multitasking by now, right?!) kills creativity.
- The more task-switching we do, the worse we get at everything, including task-switching. This means that self-proclaimed “multitaskers” are bad at ignoring irrelevant information, switching between tasks effectively, and at organizing information in their heads.
Excerpted from: The Myths of Multitasking (and why Switch-tasking, or task-switching, is really what you’re doing)
We all have too much to do, and we need to find ways to get the important work done. I remember when I had the luxury of working on one thing and doing it really well…I feel like the last time I had that luxury was in grad school. Nowadays I have to find ways to do more things than I have time for, so I’ve been blocking time to work on things for periods to make a bit of headway on each, while still respecting each project and giving it some undivided attention.
But it’s difficult.
One of my former labmates and I were commiserating about writing our theses, way back when. I always felt like I couldn’t get anything done unless I had a full day to write. Erick reminded me that even an hour spent focused on writing was better than no writing. He was right…and it helped me get my PhD thesis written at a time when I was juggling the last year or two of my degree, while also teaching almost full time in another city, and commuting back and forth, while writing lectures and marking papers.
In the end I got it all done, one block of focused time at a time…..
