Multitasking Can Make You Lose ... Um ...

Focus
October 29, 2008
By Alina Tugend

As you are reading this article, are you listening to music or the radio? If you are looking at it
online, are you e-mailing or instant-messaging at the same time?

Since the 1990s, we’ve accepted multitasking without question. Virtually all of us spend part or
most of our day either rapidly switching from one task to another or juggling two or more things
at the same time.

While multitasking may seem to be saving time, psychologists, neuroscientists and others are
finding that it can put us under a great deal of stress and actually make us less efficient.

Although doing many things at the same time — reading an article while listening to music,
switching to check e-mail messages and talking on the phone — can be a way of making tasks
more fun and energizing, “you have to keep in mind that you sacrifice focus when you do this,”
said Edward M. Hallowell, a psychiatrist and author of “CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked,
and About to Snap!” (Ballantine, 2006). “Multitasking is shifting focus from one task to another
in rapid succession. It gives the illusion that we’re simultaneously tasking, but we’re really not.
It’s like playing tennis with three balls.”

Of course, it depends what you’re doing. For some people, listening to music while working
actually makes them more creative because they are using different cognitive functions.

But despite what many of us think, you cannot simultaneously e-mail and talk on the phone. I
think we’re all familiar with what Dr. Hallowell calls “e-mail voice,” when someone you’re
talking to on the phone suddenly sounds, well, disengaged. “You cannot divide your attention
like that,” he said. “It’s a big illusion. You can only shift back and forth.”

As we are required, or feel required, to do more and more things in a shorter period of time,
researchers are trying to figure out how the brain changes attention from one subject to another.

Earl Miller, the Picower professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
explained it this way: human brains have a very large prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the
brain that contains the “executive control” process. This helps us switch and prioritize tasks.

In humans, he said, the prefrontal cortex is about one-third of the entire cortex, while in dogs and
cats, it is 4 or 5 percent and in monkeys about 15 percent.

“With the growth of the prefrontal cortex, animals become more and more flexible in their
behavior,” Professor Miller said. We can do a couple of things at the same time if they are
routine, but once they demand more cognitive process, the brain has “a severe bottleneck,” he
said.

Questions for Part One:

According to the article, what is multitasking?

Why does multitasking cause stress?

Describe a time when you tried to do two or more things at once.

David E. Meyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, and his colleagues
looked at young adults as they performed tasks that involved solving math problems or
classifying geometric objects.

Their 2001 study found that for all types of tasks, the participants lost time when they had to
move back and forth from one undertaking to another, and that it took significantly longer to
switch between the more complicated tasks.

Although the time it takes for our brains to switch tasks may be only a few seconds or less, it
adds up. If we’re talking about doing two jobs that can require real concentration, like
text-messaging and driving, it can be fatal.

The RAC Foundation, a British nonprofit organization that focuses on driving issues, asked 17
drivers, age 17 to 24, to use a driving simulator to see how texting affected driving. The
reaction time was around 35 percent slower when writing a text message — slower than driving
drunk or stoned.

A 2005 study found that people were interrupted and moved from one project to another about
every 11 minutes. And each time, it took about 25 minutes to circle back to that same project.

Interestingly, in a study published last April, Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the
University of California found that people were as likely to self-interrupt as to be interrupted by
someone else.

“As observers, we’ll watch, and then after every 12 minutes or so, for no apparent reasons,
someone working on a document will turn and call someone or e-mail,” she said. As I read that, I
realized how often I was switching between writing this article and checking my e-mail.

Professor Mark said further research needed to be done to know why people work in these
patterns, but our increasingly shorter attention spans probably have something to do with it.

Her study found that after only 20 minutes of interrupted performance, people reported
significantly higher stress, frustration, workload, effort and pressure.

Dr. Hallowell has termed this effort to multitask “attention deficit trait.” Unlike attention deficit
disorder, which he has studied for years and has a neurological basis, attention deficit trait
“springs entirely from the environment,” he wrote in a 2005 Harvard Business Review article.
But Dr. Hallowell says that despite our belief that we cannot control how much we’re
overloaded, we can.

“We need to recreate boundaries,” he said. That means training yourself not to look at your
BlackBerry every 20 seconds, or turning off your cellphone. It means trying to change your work
culture so such devices are banned at meetings. Sleeping less to do more is a bad strategy, he
says. We are efficient only when we sleep enough, eat right and exercise.

So the next time the phone rings and a good friend is on the line, try this trick: Sit on the couch.
Focus on the conversation. Don’t jump up, no matter how much you feel the need to clean the
kitchen. It seems weird, but stick with it. You, too, can learn the art of single-tasking.

Questions for Part Two:

How is the workplace negatively affected by multitasking?

Why could it be dangerous to text while driving?

What are some strategies from the article you could try to help you stay focused?