Multitasking = cognitive hell.
A tidal wave of evidence supports the idea that multitasking, that bliss / obsession / fever dream / affliction of so many of us, actively impedes our ability to work and think.
And yet we persist. Walter Kirn explores this phenomenon in an interesting, if flawed, essay (subscription required) in the 150th anniversary issue of The Atlantic Monthly.
The effects aren’t just personal, but societal — and certainly they loom large for the business world. Here’s a key passage from Kirn:
There may be a financial cost to multitasking as well. The sum is extremely large and hard to vouch for, the esoteric algorithm that yielded it a puzzle to all but its creator, possibly, but it’s one of those figures that’s fun to quote in bars.
Six hundred and fifty billion dollars. That’s what we might call our National Attention Deficit, according to Jonathan B. Spira, who’s the chief analyst at a business-research firm called Basex and has estimated the per annum cost to the economy of multitasking-induced disruptions. (He obtained the figure by surveying office workers across the country, who reported that some 28 percent of their time was wasted dealing with multitasking- related transitions and interruptions.)
That $650 billion reflects just one year’s loss. This means that the total debt is vastly higher, since personal digital assistants (the devices that, in my opinion, turned multitasking from a habit into a pathology, which the advent of Bluetooth then rendered fatal and the spread of wireless broadband made communicable) are several annums old. This puts our shortfall somewhere in the trillions . . .
The essay overreaches at points (e.g. in the section on Enron that follows close after the quotation above), but overall Kirn hits the mark in important ways.
The short version is that multitasking is a ruse, a scam, because our brains simply are not wired to do more than one complex or novel behavior at a time. Yes, I can hold up a conversation with you while I’m driving and you’re riding next to me, so long as the driving is uncomplicated. But what do we both do when I approach the on-ramp, or have to merge in traffic to get around a construction site? We both reflexively shut up long enough for me to do the more complicated bit of driving; we resume normal conversation only when that complexity has passed.
Yet our working days are filled with interruptions that derail our productivity. Worse, we choose many of these interruptions.
My own pledge to myself: to make myself less crazy with all the multitasking. Sure, sometimes we all must task-switch, but many of us embrace a level of multitasking — and cognitive hell — that reaches far beyond this.
I’m with Kirn: enough, already. Let’s get some real work done instead.
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I couldn’t agree more, Tim. In fact, I picked up on the same article in a recent blog post. Here’s my take on it: http://tinyurl.com/3b58rf.
While I’m not sure I buy Spira’s $650 billion calculation, there’s no doubt that we’re not helping ourselves get our jobs done or take care of our personal relationships by multitasking.
The message that ‘multitasking doesn’t work for tasks beyond a given level of complexity’ is frequently oversimplified to ‘multitasking doesn’t work.’
Spira’s number isn’t a net number. It doesn’t take into account the gain from multitasking on non-complex tasks. For example, firing off a quick Crackberry response to a non-critical email while in line at the grocery store gives me time back.
Looking at it another way, let’s say I perform two tasks at the same time, and the multi-tasking costs 40% of my effectiveness at each. That means I’m performing each task 60% as well as I would if I single-tasked. Sounds woeful, but I’m performing 120% of what I would be otherwise. If the quality of task performance isn’t critical (think waiting in line again), I come out ahead. There are many things in life that it is important to do but not important to do well.
The trick isn’t to avoid multitasking, it’s to identify the important tasks that require focused attention. Driving is obvious, but talking to your spouse or children is just as important. If you’re going to fire off Crackberry responses while in line at the grocery store, have the self-discipline to understand which emails should wait for focused attention.
Curmudgeons and old fogies like me resist multitasking because we haven’t grown up doing that kind of prioritization. We rationalize it with bad math based on the faulty assumption that all tasks are equally important. Millennials that have grown up with it do it more fluidly.
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I submit that we must all manage our time. One of the old ‘management’ tests is the inbox. What does the individual choose to work first and what is the priority. During my normal day I will multitask during status meetings (we have all heard the excuses before) and while on the email. But, for a conversation with a customer, be it phone or face to face, I try to devote my entire attention to the conversation, e.g. what is not being verbalized.
The flip side of mutitasking for the person on the other side of the conversation, is that you are not important to the person multitasking. You rank there with the email, headlines, etc. I still remember as a young man, a VP of another company talking to me in a crowded room and I knew I had his whole attention in spite of the distractions around us. I was important to him. Talk about a shot to my self esteem.
It is a sad commentary on the rudeness of our society today that Texting, Twittering, Phones, and Crackberries are as important to us as the person face to face in front of us.
Regina Brett, in The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH) puts it in a question, “In five years, will this matter?” Maturity is in reality making better choices in life. It is through your choices that you manage your life and time.
I agree with pretty much everything you say here, Steve.
In particular, I like your point about the VP who listened to you intently despite the distractions. I think we often miss opportunities to have that kind of impact on others (customers, colleagues, proteges, family members, et al.) who could really benefit from even a little bit of our focused time.
I agree that multitasking is detrimental to finishing one complex task. Anything requiring a lot of concentration is at risk from constant interruptions. But I think that it’s great for mundane tasks. Which probably account for a lot more of our work than we realize.
If the tasks are *truly* mundane, I agree. Nothing keeps you from listening to the radio while you fold laundry, for example. By extension, the guy in the mailroom can sort the mail while he’s jamming out on his iPod.
But if you’re doing anything that requires abstract thought, I’m dubious. Even things that seem simple go a lot faster and get done a lot cleaner when they get done without distraction or interruption.