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Multitasking Harmful To Productivity
Greyfox writes: "According to a CNN article, a person who is multitasking several things takes a hit on his productivity. Oddly enough, it reads almost exactly like a description of the problem with multitasking on computers; context switches cost, especially if you have to swap a lot of crap out in order to fit the new process into memory. So basically, an employee who can stay focussed on one thing for long periods of time is going to have higher productivity than one who has to handle constant interrupts. Now if I could get my manager to buy into that ..."
There was significant evidence a while back (and I can't link to it... grr where is it)... that women can listen to two conversations at a time because their brains are developed differently -- both hemispheres of the female brain respond to audio, but only one hemisphere of the male brain does.
This suggests that women would be great at multitasking and also an explanation of why they expect us to listen to them when we're busy.
Weevil
ghaa.
Hmm, that's interesting. For me, I can't use a form of languages on two tracks simultaneously. I can't talk and listen, or talk and write, or listen and write, or read and listen, or read and talk (unless I'm reading aloud) at the same time. I can jump back and forth between two tracks with no problem, and a little bit of overlap is fine, but I can't maintain two tracks of language usage for more than a few seconds.
Doing tech support, this means I can't listen to a customer while taking notes - I have to wait for a pause in the conversation before I can take my notes (or put them on hold, or whatever). If I try to take notes, I can only get a few seconds before I can no longer hear the customer - needless to say, this is rather embarassing, so I try not to do it. Fortunately my boss was somewhat understanding, so I never got in serious trouble for having a low call volume.
I wonder if I have a milder version of what you describe? I've never talked to a doctor about it; this is all just from my own personal observation of myself.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
However, most modern piloting tasks don't require deep thinking. Try doing all that, or even half of that, plus taking a star sight and working out your position with sliderule and nav tables... That's why large airplanes used to have a four man flight crew -- two to fly, one to watch the multiple engines, and one to navigate -- and small airplanes didn't use to have that many distractions. E.g., Lindbergh could center the controls and take a star sight without worrying about running into anything over the Atlantic ocean.
Eating is mearly a simple daemon process. While it takes a few cycles, and a small amount of memory, the context switch isn't noticeable.
Isn't eating while you code multi-tasking? Therefore, multi-tasking does work making the article complete hogwash!
You die too easily.
There some very good parallels between brain work and computing in the 60's. A good CPU would often overrun the IO devices, and since the CPU cost half a million they didn't like wait cycles. So when it had to wait for IO, it would switch to another task, until that had to wait also, etc. The analogy is to you working on one job until you find that you need information from someone else to proceed, writing e-mail to him, then switch to another job until the reply comes back. This (task switching when on hold) improves productivity. On the other hand, when you get a phone call about some project you aren't even working on today, or have to stop coding to go to a meeting about parking spaces, you lose productivity. Likewise, interrupt-driven task switching tends to reduce the number of jobs finished per hour, and only became common when the CPU's became fast and cheap enough that you could afford to waste cycles.
Since the human brain isn't getting any faster, any situation where you are frequently interrupted is going to reduce the amount or quality of work completed. Note also that there are major and minor context switches, and the cost difference is much larger than the difference between switching processes and threads. Switching to a different part of the same project requires re-loading "registers" (short term memory), but the major context of the project stays the same. Switching to something I put away last week will probably require skimming through some of the documents to remember where I left off and to refresh my memory of the overall structure.
This is known since Taylor :
:
a worker that is specialized in a single movement is more productive than another doing different things.
But this is only true in a short term view
The fact that workers feel less considered will bring less productivity and a bad feeling about the company.
There's a running joe that James' century old work represents basically everything cognitive scientists know today. In other words, not much new progress in the last 100 years. :) Anyways, to quote from James' book, chapter 11 (emphasis mine):
[p. 409] If, then, by the original question, how many ideas or things can we attend to at once, be meant how many entirely disconnected systems or processes of conception can go on simultaneously, the answer is, not easily more than one, unless the processes are very habitual; but then two, or even three, without very much oscillation of the attention. Where, however, the processes are less automatic, as in the story of Julius Caesar dictating four letters whilst he writes a fifth,[9] there must be a rapid oscillation of the mind from one to the next, and no consequent gain of time. Within any one of the systems the parts may be numberless, but we attend to them collectively when we conceive the whole which they form.
When the things to be attended to are small sensations, and when the effort is to be exact in noting them, it is found that attention to one interferes a good deal with the perception of the other. A good deal of fine work has been done in this field, of which I must give some account.
It has long been noticed, when expectant attention is concentrated upon one of two sensations, that the other one is apt to be displaced from consciousness for a moment and to appear subsequent; although in reality the two may have been contemporaneous events...
Chad Loder
Rapid 7, Inc.
The next generation of network security products
Some thoughts from my workplace
I find myself more and more multitasking (and now its not just because i have to use win2k at work - but that adds to it) the fact is that we are caught by a couple of things
1. Expectations of Users - The average user has come to expect support and help in a much quciker time frame which couples with their increasing knowledge and skills (note this in general) to produce a class of user who thinks every problem is major and they then try to fix it them selves therefore ensuring it IS a major problem.
2. complexity of systems - this goes hand in handwith the above - eveyr day systems grow more and more complex - we are in the process of SAP implementation and this is a killer on the back on WIN2k, Intranet Payroll and HR and Intranet helpdesk loggin - the number of passwords grow and there is no easy way to resolve the issue and maintain security - that means the system become more complex on a daily basis and the struggle for support staff and users to keep up with the required skills and knowledge (paid training is an impossible joke in most companies - it does not happen)
3. Time and Resources - time is a valuable concept - the amount of time in a day is finite at 24 hours and you can only work so much of it - yet i spend a lot of my time waiting for things to load and dealing with FIX THIS NOW requests for low priority issues whilst trying to fix the major issues i have - it takes longer to tell them to go away than the fix would but you have to maintain a focus. Staffing resources have also decreased - in my role its down to 1 staff member for every 100 staff and sometimes less - i have a state to run with approx 200 users and there is me and one part time partly skilled staff member who gets sick 2 days a week, so you can imagine that i dont have time to relax - 18 hour days are standard and i have done more than one 20 hour.
4. Money - the pressure of technology means that companies have to stay on top of things to survive - that means upgrades, new systems, software etc. This comes at a huge cost - SAP cost us AU$20 Million and thats only year 1 - dont forget as IT we now have to look after Phones, Video Conferencing, TV's, Boardrooms, Photocopiers, Fax Machine, Building Management Systems, Security Systems, etc etc - all this with less staff than before (2 years ago to do less i had 3 staff full time working flat out) - no money = no staff (SAP again)
SO whats the multitasking point ?
Yes staff who multitask are probably less efficient but then again hiring adequate staff to fill the roles in an organisation would mean less multi tasking and more efficiency - simple maths really.
I multitask because i have to - the headaches, backachec, half done jobs and 10000 email messages i cold do without - im efficient as hell tho - i have to be to survive and stay sane.
No if you will excuse me the 5 minutes i took to write this whilst waiting for a server to reboot is up and i have to go fix SQL - god i wish i had another pair of hands as well...
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
The interruptions of yammering coworkers are the hardest part of the job. The work itself, by comparison, is easy. It's finding the concentration, maintaining focus, that turn it into such a challenge.
Any employer who thinks they are saving money by doling out less square footage per "unit" is sadly deluded.
Of course, some people seem to thrive in such environments. However, when I challenge them and get them into a quieter environment, they almost always perform better. As for those who need the oversight of short walls to keep them on track, the company would be better off without them.
Maybe they never read Human Action by Ludwig von Mises
Being it doesn't have any pictures, I doubt that any CNN reporter or producer would be interested.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
DeMarco and Lister touch on this a bit in Peopleware. There was a relevant study done at Cornell University. A group of people were queried as to their work preferences - with music or without. They were then divided up into two groups such that each group had half "prefer music" and half "prefer none". They were then given a programming assignment to get done in a set amount of time. One group worked with music, one without. Completion percentages were about equal in each group
There was a twist in the project, though. The assignment involved inputting numbers, putting them through a series of involved mathematical manipulations, and outputting the result. The manipulations actually resulted in the output number being the same as the input number. The overwhelming number of people who realized this came from the "without music" group.
The "left brain/right brain" theorists will tell you that the in the "with music" group, the creative side of the brain was tied up listening to the music and wasn't available to make the jump of realizing the math reduced to an identity function. I don't know if that's the real explanation, but it looks like something on that order is going on.
Tell a stock trader that he's going to be more "productive" by simply walking over to the gentleman he wishes to conduct a transaction with, and speaking quietly versus standing elbow deep in a pit with thousands of other guys screaming at the top of his lungs and flinging gestures at other traders.
It all comes down to the work environment. For some things, like engineering, QA, R&D, a quiet distraction-free environment is ideal. For other things, where transaction speed matters more than quality of execution, multitasking is the only way to go.
Bowie J. Poag
This is no surprise for anybody who participates in certain sports.
For example - in SCUBA diving, especially technical diving such as cave diving or deep diving, task loading is known as a huge problem that the diver has to overcome. Not only is there the time cost of changing contexts, there is an additional cost in stress - and stressed divers make mistakes and die.
A diver will spend a lot of time training so that his or her attention isn't taken up by performing regular tasks - which is to say, so that their conscious attention doesn't have to including those tasks in its scheduler.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
A discussion of "multitasking for programmers" and why it hurts is at Distraction: the one big obstacle. This is written for programmers, but it is true for everbyody who works with knowledge.
You found a sword: +4 damage, +5 moderator points
We didn't have computerized timesheet system at that time(I got to write one later) because CPU time was costy. We had given a stack of palm-size timesheet cards, each slot is a 15-minute interval.(I think newer IBMers could find this timecards in storage room, they've printed quite a lot of them)
It wasn't so bad when one day our new manager introducing 'time-slicing' time-management technique, that we had to fill in different tasks in each time slot, to prove that you've 'used your time efficiently'.
Time-slicing was a new buzzwords that days. Obviously he didn't quite catch the meaning of it.
Clueless managers can be found everywhere.
I can't. I have CAPD(Central Audiotory Processing Disorder). I could spit it out, if I knew what he was asking, but that's what I can't do, make sense of what I hear. If I'm doing ANYTHING else, I don't understand what somebody is saying to me, be it hitting something with a hammer, reading a book, coding, looking at a wall, if my attention is even remotely used for something else, I can't hear people.
That includes thinking of what to say when they're done talking, or if they get me thinking of something else. It's really annoying, actually. That's why I can't do the phone-monkey thing.It does have its advantages, though. I'm not easily interrupted when doing work, I don't hear people talking to me when I don't want to, it's not ignoring, it's involentary, but convenient at times. I have not trouble visiting my own little world.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
Hey I'm a girl and perfectly capable of multitasking when necessary. Can I point out that asking you to turning the radio down was probably a sensible course of action. May I also point out the well known fact that almost all girls are capable of thinking of several things simultaneously, whereas very few men are able to do this. Conclusion: girls _can_ multitask, they're renowned for it!
.. i think. I've found that when it's something that requires brain work (umm, like coding) it's good to get long periods of continuous work. It takes some time to get into the "mood" where you just start hitting code. Also, of course, every time you start over you gotta think and "reorganize" your thoughts to the problem at hand. It takes some time too.
The World's Best Music!
Where I work we don't have any specific rules about this kind of thing so things happen both ways, but on the one project where one other guy and I are working side by side on a piece of code, our productivity jumps thru the roof, and not only do we get MUCH more done, the code we produce comes back from QA with almost none(or in several cases Zero) defects. I think alot of it has to do with us catching each others dumb mistakes, and i don't just mean missing ';' or other things that compilers will check (In fact we had to teach our selves to igonor such problems when the other was typing becuase by the end of the day we woudl want to kill each other) We will catch simple logic errors and flawed assumptions as the come up because each of us already has an idea of what the code will look like, and if the other does something completly strange we can discuss it and figure out if its the right thing to do, all before its ever finished. There is nothing worse than digging thru 5k lines of code looking for weird logic erros.
Right on. However, the researchers here seem to have a rather simplistic, one-dimensional view of multitasking.
(OK, sound research starts by validating a few simple concepts, then building more complex structures later. But seriously, eight years of research, for merely this? I guess they've got to keep some ideas in their back pockets, ready for a next round of grants.)
There are two ways multitasking can happen: chosen swapout of tasks (you mention waiting for something to finish, but it might be waiting for anything - email reply, phone callback, etc.), and imposed interruptions (phone, instant-message, chatty boss/coworker, and so on). Swapouts are like enqueue-wait swaps on a mainframe - you know it's going to be awhile before you can resume that task, so you turn to something else. Interruptions are like, well... I/O interrupts - they demand immediate attention, whether or not its convenient at the moment. Swapouts tend to _improve_ efficiency generally, and so does minimal servicing of trivial I/O interrupts. Continuing the mainframe analogy, a first-level I/O interrupt handler merely fills a buffer and posts an ACK, then exits; these don't seriously degrade scheduling. What hurts productivity are interrupts that are forced as untimely swapouts of important, hard tasks.
A long time ago, I did some applications programming in COBOL for a S&L. (Yeah, I know COBOL sucks, but it paid the mortgage and I also taught myself IBM S/360 ASM during the same period.) Anyway, I was easily the most productive programmer in the shop, because I always had at least three and sometimes half a dozen projects ongoing at once. This was back when you were lucky to get two compilations of any one program per day. So, I'd code in one program, submit it for compile, and go on to coding in another program. It was quite effective, swapping tasks that way. Of course, it also helped that the programs were usually related.
As with many things, the real issue here is empowerment. Workers who can choose when to swap out tasks and turn to other ones will always be more productive (and happier) than those who are constantly interrupt-driven and never get to take anything to a "stopping point." This seems obvious: it's why you don't have the Help Desk do any network engineering or complex programming.
This is old news. In the car industry back to the Ford T model each employees are working on a specific task and not each one working on all parts of the car making process. When you focus on one task you gain in productivity. Nothing new here...
--- Bouh !!! ---
I wonder what they controlled for in this study. i remember seeing a TV show where some researchers discovered that in general women are much better at multitasking then men. That study had limitations as well (the tasks were quite specific: frying an egg, doing a crossword, ironing a shirt. God knows I can't iron a shirt), but i wouldn't be too surprised if the result were accurate.