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Divided to distraction: Multitaskers can’t focus

10th October, 2009 - Posted by Editor - No Comments

“There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time. This steady and undissipated attention to one object is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind,” Lord Chesterfield wrote to his son in the 1740s.

Today hurry, bustle and agitation define our lives, so much so we have embraced “multitasking” – a concept initially used to describe computers’ parallel processing abilities – to describe “the human attempt to simultaneously do as many things as possible, as quickly as possible, by preferably marshalling the power of as many technologies as possible,” comments Christine Rosen in an article published in science and technology journal The New Atlantis.

Multitasking is a myth

“In the late 1990s and early 2000s, one sensed a kind of exuberance about the possibilities of multitasking. Advertisements for new electronic gadgets – particularly the first generation of handheld digital devices – celebrated the notion of using technology to accomplish several things at once. In restyling themselves as high-tech, high-performing team players, office workers listed ‘multitasking’ as a skill in their curriculum vitae,” Rosen notes.

Now experts are literally taking the so-called practice of multitasking to task.  Dr Edward Hallowell, a Massachusetts-based psychiatrist, who specialises in the treatment of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and author of CrazyBusy says multitasking is a “mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously.”

He says a new condition, Attention Deficit Trait (ADT), which has the same hallmark symptoms as ADHD, is rampant in the business world. ADT is “purely a response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live,” says Hallowell. “Never in history has the human brain been asked to track so many data points. This challenge “can be controlled only by creatively engineering one’s environment and one’s emotional and physical health.” It is therefore essential to limit multitasking.

Are you multitasking, or task switching and background tasking?

Imagine a typical day at the office. You are working on something your boss needs fairly urgently. Then your e-mail client pings, alerting you to a new incoming e-mail message. Like most people, you will stop what you are doing and open the e-mail. Then, someone comes into your office to tell you about the latest gossip from the weekend. Another person joins the conversation and pretty soon you’re talking about other topics that have branched off from the original conversation. Then you take a phone call from someone who needs to see you about something in 10 minutes. You take another call from another person who wants you to attend a meeting in an hour’s time. You add the appointment to your Outlook calendar and set the alarm to remind you of the meeting. A third person comes into your office and the gossip continues. You have to leave for the meeting in ten minutes. You think there is little point in getting back to your original task, because you won’t finish it anyway. So, you kill the 10 minutes and leave early.

What did you actually achieve? The original task started at the beginning of the day is still unfinished. Gossiping for almost two hours achieved nothing and you didn’t attend to that e-mail. Since a valuable half a day is lost, you are now under pressure to finish the original task. In a space of two hours, the only thing you managed to do is to work yourself into a stressed state.

This is not a classic example of multitasking; it’s “switch tasking,” which involves switching from one task to another, says business coach and author of ‘The myth of multitasking – How doing it all gets nothing done’, Dave Crenshaw. In other words, you stop doing what you are doing to start something else. This goes on and on until you eventually have to switch back to your original task.

Similarly, doing things like driving and listening to mobile phone messages simultaneously, isn’t multitasking either. It is “background tasking,” which entails doing two or three things that do not require a lot of mental effort, simultaneously, says Crenshaw.

He says everyday tasks, like driving your car to and from work, do not require mental effort, so they become automatic. Most people drive the same route to work everyday, so they don’t exert any real mental effort and don’t have to concentrate as hard as when they drive a new route. So, your brain does the background task, while you attend to something else that requires more of your attention.

Multitasking can slow you down. Dr David Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan discovered that the more complex activities a person takes on, the more time it actually takes in the long run. Moreover, when you take on multiple tasks, you cannot perform them all at an optimum level. He also found that multitasking contributes to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline, which can cause long-term health problems if not controlled and contributes to short-term memory loss.

Unlike other researchers Meyer believes, with training, the brain can learn to task-switch between simple tasks more effectively.

Multitasking is expensive

Doing many things at once – bad idea; finding ways to arrange work so that many things happen at once – good idea, says Harvard Business School’s Stever Robbins.

Businesses, which are ever concerned about proper time management, are increasingly becoming aware of the effects of workplace distractions spawned by a multitasking culture. An analyst at business research firm Basex, Jonathan B. Spira estimated that extreme multitasking – information overload – cost the US economy $650 billion in 2007 in lost productivity.

A 2005 study conducted by the University of London’s Institute of Psychiatry found that the average worker’s functioning IQ dropped 10 points when multitasking. This is more than double the drop when someone smokes marijuana. The functioning IQ drop was, interestingly, more significant in men.

Another study at the University of California at Irvine, which monitored interruptions among office workers, found that workers took an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from interruptions, like phone calls or answering e-mail and return to their original tasks.

Some experts predict that kids who send instant messages, while doing their homework, playing online games and watching TV, might become adults who only have the capacity to engage in “very quick and very shallow thinking and won’t do well in the long run. Others say we could be heading for an “attention-deficit recession”.

Multitasking makes it difficult to learn

A recent study conducted by a psychology professor at the University of California, Russell Poldrack found that multitasking adversely affects how you learn. “Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialised, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily,” he says.

The research demonstrates that people use different areas of the brain for learning and storing new information when they are distracted. Brain scans of people, who are distracted or multitasking, show activity in the striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning new skills; and brain scans of people who are not distracted show activity in the hippocampus, a region involved in storing and recalling information.

“We have to be aware that there is a cost to the way that our society is changing, that humans are not built to work this way. We’re really built to focus. And when we sort of force ourselves to multitask, we’re driving ourselves to perhaps be less efficient in the long run, even though it sometimes feels like we’re being more efficient,” says Poldrack.

Multitasking and the lost art of focusing

“Focusing is underrated, and has been for quite some time. Yet it’s the secret to great work,” says the popular marketing blog TheFutureBuzz.com’s, Adam Singer.

Twitter, e-mail, phone calls, instant messages, web browsing – are all distractions and ultimately collateral tasks, which constantly call for your attention, but don’t make a real difference in accomplishing production objectives.  “If you’re not a prolific producer, you’re never going to be successful,” he says.

We are satisfied most when we finish serious projects. To get the best results, however, it is often necessary to unplug. As an artist and a blogger, Singer closes Firefox, turns off his cell phone and eliminates all outside distractions before he starts working on an idea.

He says, “There is simply no other way to get solid writing completed, it is imperative to focus 100% of your attention on it.  It’s like that with any successful, high quality project.”

Multitasking is a myth. Even if you are getting work done, you are accomplishing nothing, because it will be sub-par.  And there’s no point in completing projects that are sub-par in the first place.  If you want to do anything that you will actually be proud of, it’s all about focusing,” says Singer.

“There is no sense in being more productive to produce results anyone else can.  If you’re doing that, you’re relatively dispensable.  There’s just no value in it. Quality, not quantity wins in the game of infinite choices.”

Singer says, “Unfortunately focusing is a lost art, especially in my generation.  We grew up working on projects and studying while browsing the web, eating dinner and talking with our peers.  I only learned self-discipline later in life, but I had to unlearn the habits I acquired growing up multitasking.  You don’t have much to gain from it, because while you may feel like you’re getting more done, the results of your efforts suffer.”

Rosen comments, “Given what neuroscience and anecdotal evidence have shown us, this state of constant intentional self-distraction could well be of profound detriment to individual and cultural well-being. When people do their work only in the “interstices of their mind-wandering,” with crumbs of attention rationed out among many competing tasks, their culture may gain in information, but it will surely weaken in wisdom.”