We live in a world in which information and tasks flow to us at an exponentially increasing rate. Whether you have ADHD or not, you no doubt sometimes feel distracted and overwhelmed by it all. Many people who do not have ADHD feel as if they do, because the flow of information and tasks makes it hard for them to keep their attention focused.
You may be thinking “Oh no, not another lecture on multitasking. I get so much work done because I do multitask, and it makes me feel good being busy all the time. I love having too much to do … it gives me a rush and makes me feel useful.” And, you say, you can get done in 50 hours what it would take 70 hours to do if you didn’t multitask. You may even be figuring that you are just going to get better and better at multitasking, so that you can handle any future increases in the river of data and tasks that you are standing in.
Well it is true that some types of activities can be effectively multitasked. For example, you can get away with using your BlackBerry to process email while setting in a dull meeting, half-way listening to someone you think is a dumbass make a presentation that you’ve heard before. Of course, ideally you would not even be in the meeting, but we all know it doesn’t work out that way sometimes.
And, you can generally do okay when one of the activities is a motor-control activity, such as riding a bike. That’s because when you practice an activity a lot, its planning and execution moves from the primary thinking part of the brain to the part that handles “automatic” thinking and execution. This lets you ride your bike for exercise, while at the same time thinking through how you want to modify your upcoming presentation to the Board.
You can probably think of several examples where you know from experience that you can handle “multitasking” okay (even if it’s just quasi-multitasking because one of the activities doesn’t really require much thought).
But, there are clearly cases where multitasking can get you in trouble, like when you are thinking through how to modify your presentation to the Board at the same time you are having sex with your spouse. That’s not going to work out very well. Stick to thinking about the presentation while riding your bike. Better yet, schedule an appointment with yourself at the office to think about it in a dedicated way for an hour.
Another famous example of problematic multitasking is responding to email and talking on the phone at the same time. Neither activity is suited for handling by the automatic part of your mind (even if it seems like they should be), so you wind up splitting your time between the activities, not really multitasking but doing rapid task-switching. With each switch, your mind has to play catchup. By working this way, you are more likely to make errors or to just not handle either task as well as you would if you processed them individually. The result is a lower quality email and a person on the phone who is pissed because they have figured out you are spending part of your time handling email instead of giving them your full attention. (Yes, you can generally tell when someone you are talking to is also processing email.)
Indeed, multitasking can often cause problems, including some long-term problems. For example, a paper presented to the highly prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences summarized the results of a study that found that
In a series of three classic psychology tests for attention and memory, the “low multitaskers” consistently outdid their highly multitasking counterparts.
I’ll repeat that for emphasis, in case you are talking on the phone while reading this: those who rarely multitasked consistently outdid those who multitasked a lot.
In another report in PsychCentral on this same study , the lead researcher was quoted as saying:
“We kept looking for what they’re better at [... the frequent multi-taskers ...], and we didn’t find it,” said Ophir, the study’s lead author and a researcher in Stanford’s Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab.
Other studies have shown what you have probably already found out from experience: that excessive multitasking can lead to stress and forgetting important activities until deadlines have passed.
And, it’s not just us working adults who are impacted. Studies have shown that children who grow up multitasking (doing homework while watching TV and talking on the phone and tinkering on Facebook and the web in general) grow into young adults who do not have the ability to solve problems or to learn well. They got by in school without ever really having to set down and work through complex problems, and they never develop the ability to do so.
So, what’s the bottom line? Well, the need for some multitasking is here to stay. But:
- You should be selective in what you multitask. Give important things the single-minded attention they deserve.
- Set aside enough time during each day to make sure you know what the important things for the day are, so you don’t get caught up in a multitasking frenzy and zip through 100 emails and 20 phone calls that could have waited.
- Streamline tasks you do often. For example, learn how to skim reports to pick out the 20% of content that is useful instead of reading all 100%. Set up email filters to help you control your inbox. And so on.
- And, perhaps most importantly of all, is to not equate your self-worth with your productivity. If you do, you are setting yourself up to continually build up the amount of work you do so that you can, in your mind, build up your own self-worth. Ultimately that just works against you and you build up a demand on yourself that you can’t meet.
Your thoughts?
Sources: Lifehacker and World of Psychology