Multitask? Why do you think you can? - DBR 044

Do Busy Right

I talk about the three big enemies of focus and productivity. They are interruption, multitasking, and distraction. They are in order from easiest to deal with to hardest. (But I’m faking that a little.) The biggest pushback I get is around multitasking – people defend their ability to do it. Let’s deal with that here. What's our drive to attempt multitasking? What’s the evidence that we can actually do it? I’ll look at cases where people think they or someone else is multitasking. We’ll look at each one to see if it actually fits a reasonable definition of multitasking as relates to our work. Brief aside – I asked on LinkedIn and no one suggested any other categories. P.S. You can connect with me on LI where I discuss these topics as I’m producing the podcast linkedin.com/in/larrytribble. Or you can comment on this episode. I’ll show that these cases are not good evidence. Then, I’ll discuss the motivations to multitask. I’ll consider historical ideas of multitasking. Then we’ll ask the question again: should we try to multitask? Spoiler alert: I will (of course) conclude that we can’t. Computers appear to multitask and there’s the legend of mind as computer

• The sociological construct of mind as computer
• So we say – the computer’s multitasking so I should do it too. We're wrong on both counts. Our machines are very, very good task switchers – but they don’t really multitask and we haven’t developed that kind of human being
• We’re not multithreaded, particularly with the unexpected
• We don’t completely forget
• We can’t effectively reload our previous state
• All of this takes lots of time and is error prone

We don’t value our own attention and the difficulty of our own work

• Historical tasks were not heavy on attention
• We fritter away our attention on entertainment

There are certain environments where it seems we are doing it.

• Processes that we can ignore, but only for a short period of time (e.g. cooking)
• Tasks that are easily interrupted and restarted (e.g. eating)
• Active stakeholders that let us know there’s a problem (e.g. pets)
• Mindless tasks – we have to be there, but we do them on ‘autopilot’
• Walking is autonomous (until it’s not)
• Challenges of doing something else when we’re engaged in a ‘mindless’ task
• Autonomous tasks that we don’t have to think about
• Autonomous tasks that don’t need our attention – ie. delegation
• Tasks that we have learned to combine to become one task
• Juggling
• You can take the time to memorize the 1A, 2B exercise – to unify it into a single sequence in your head. But that doesn’t make it multitasking
• Simultaneous chess – actually highly practiced task-switching in a very structured environment

We think we see it, so we’re tempted to do it. People seem to be doing it around us and we’re people too.

• What we see doesn’t mean that a) they’re actually doing it, or b) that they’re getting results that we would want.
• Other people ask us to do it
• So, we claim we can
• We collectively confuse each other – if your friends jumped off a bridge…

So, I think this is why we believe that we can multitask (it’s bad evidence) – but we shouldn’t

• Multitasking wasn’t even a concept before about 1960
• N-gram on ‘multitasking’
• All of the productivity literature before computing was very different – focus on focus
• Our desire to task switch may be a form of boredom, procrastination
• Focus is hard and so is our work
• There is no scientific evidence in favor of the ability to multitask
• Athletes – focus on what you’re doing, not how you’re doing it – anything else is multitasking and hurts performance

Consider the evidence and question it – there’s no real evidence that we can multitask, it only seems that way. This may help you clarify and decide to stop trying to do it Then we can move on to improving our focus and fighting interruption and distraction.