The Downside of 'Hypertasking'

Combuchan writes "An interesting article from AZ Central expounds upon the downside of 'hypertasking,' doing far too much at once, such as talking on the phone while doing office work at the Starbuck's has a whole host of negative side effects: irritability, impatience, sleeplessness, an overly extended workweek, and is largely unproductive. With wi-fi hotspots popping up everywhere and computing power shrinking, are we all doomed? Or, as the article indicates, it's possibily evolution of the mind at work."

Comments

IMHO

[perlchild]

Maybe it just means we have lots of power to do things differently, and manage time effectively, but we never learned how.

Just because we can work at the Starbucks doesn't necessarily mean we should, but on the other hand, because we can, we can pick it as a regular place of work, and decide save an employer some dollars in office space, increasing our employee value.

There are lots of new disruptive technologies out there that can benefit both employers and employees, but only if the employees embrace them, as ways to get themselves more flexibility and other advantages. That means good things, provided we're all willing to become entrepreneurs of a sort, last I checked it was a minority that was ok with being responsible of all their own work conditions. (Lots of people are ok with being responsible for the benefits, but not of the tradeoffs.)

The proportion of it going on is however, likely to increase. The biggest problem we are facing will be effective management of people, we have effective clone management down to an art, and effective management of sheep too, but much more rarely of individuals. A good place to study this, for the researchers reading, would be to poll those successful game company managers, finding out how those who not only make games that rock the players, but mostly, finding the rare few, who make games on time, by feeding and stroking the egos of designers and creators, to get them to overaccomplish themselves instead of being at cross-purposes.

req'd hypertasking as a management technique

[Anonymous Coward]

In my experience, managers are well aware of the negative effects of hypertasking and therefore require it of people they want to reduce the efficiacy of.

If they dicover you can do the "geek hyperfocus trick", they will immediately burden you with parallel and interrupting tasks to stop you working so efficiently that you challenge them and "show up" other's relative lack of ability. If they see that you have prioritised and serialised the tasks and are hyperfocusing on each one sequentially, they will interrupt you every few minutes - even when you are completing each task before its deadline.

Info Overload

[MadMacSkillz]

Reminds me of the last school I worked at (as Network Admin.) Various support departments were e-mailing teachers a kabillion times a week, and as a result the teachers stopped reading the e-mails - there were too many. I told each department, "Hey, why don't we set up a web page, and each of you can have one paragraph on it. Then we just tell the teachers to check the web page once a day!" They would not consent to it - they said they had "too much information to share." When I pointed out that no one was reading their e-mails anyway at this point in time, they just looked at me. I'm pretty sure they were thinking "Don't confuse us with the facts!"

Re:It's more fun

[maskedbishounen]

I've done that plenty of times. Nothing like looking up from code every few minutes to see people hounding you over IRC, and trying to juggle the function you're writing along with their silly demands for your help at the same time.

Most of the time I have to quit one to do the other successfully, or neither gets done well.

Re:The trick is to make technology your slave

[bconway]

I personally don't get that many e-mails at work but i've heard the Finance director saying he gets 400 e-mails a week. I fail to accept that reading all these e-mail is a productive use of his time and companies ran just fine before e-mail. Only uses the technology if it helps you work more efficiently.

Are you kidding? Have you ever done a paper-to-paperless conversion project of any sort? How long do you think it would take for the finance director to get the same things done if each of those 400 emails was someone knocking on his door or sending a letter from outside the company? Would that be a more productive use of his time? Every conversion project I've been involved in has led to at least 4x the productivity, that certainly sounds like technology making things move more efficiently.

Responsiveness versus hypertasking

[ewg]

I use mobile communications to implement responsiveness rather than hypertasking. It's great to be able to check work email and get back to people quickly, either with an answer or at least a courtesy response.

Just yesterday I handled two minor issues while waiting at the automobile dealership service department. Two people got answers within minutes rather than waiting over a (USA) holiday weekend, and I cleared two tasks from next week's to-do list. Abosuletly joyful.

So I use the task-switching capability of mobile communications rather than the hypertasking capability, to the benefit of my coworkers and hopefully my career.

We Have The Option of Steping Back?

[EXTomar]

This may sound like an odd thing to say but realizing one has options is a prerequist to taking the option. If one doesn't realize they have the option of just sitting in Starbucks without doing work then how are they supposed to stop hypertasking?

This isn't as simple as it sounds especially in a sectors of the economy that put the emphisis on "a lot is less is a lot more!" Like IT, if one person can manage 5 machines is there a way to make one person manage 10? Off the bat I would usually say "Yes, make them work twice as much". This is how you start down the path of hypertasking. You load up workers with abnormal but do able amounts of work. You find yourself having to do things at every possible moment of your day. It becomes habitial that you must be busy else you are doing something wrong. And once it becomes habitual it becomes harder to think "should I be doing this?" Worse yet is that your boss starts behaving and expecting high workloads as the norm. Your boss doesn't see any good reason why he should have people maintain five machines when they can maintain ten.

So sure you can say "just back off" but there are behavioral and monetary reasons they can't just back off. Striving to make operational units do more work with less reason is a good thing. However if they are already as efficient as possible, the only way to boost productivity is to make them hypertask. As the article points out this productivity really isn't an improvement since it costs the "sanity" of your workers.

Ain't no such thing as multi-tasking?

[kinrowan]

I've always kind of felt like there wasn't any such thing; that the human mind really can only do one thing at a time, and the issue of multi-/hyper-tasking has to do with how quickly and efficiently you can switch between things.

In fact, my understanding (small though it be) of Zen philosophy says that we should concentrate excluseivly on one thing at a time, thus the value of meditation. Always seemed like it might actualy make for better multi-tsking, but I've never been able to find the time to do it.

Maybe we need a book: The Zen of Hyper-tasking.

Wait, I should rite that down.

Multitasking or Task-switching

[DaoudaW]

Lots of research has been done in the area of multitasking. One of the more insightful results is that much of what passes as "multitasking" is in fact task-switching. Each switch exacts a cost as we reorient ourselves to the new/old task. If you are really interested heres enough info to write your own thesis on the topic.

The info is older than you think!

[mariox19]

From the article:

[R]esearch [...] determined that for all types of tasks, subjects lost time when they had to switch from one task to another.

I agree with you that the above observation is not new. Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations commented on the very same phenomenon. In fact, his observation appears in the very first chapter of the book:

A man commonly saunters a little in turning his hand from one sort of employment to another. When he first begins the new work he is seldom very keen and hearty; his mind, as they say, does not go to it, and for some time he rather trifles than applies to good purpose. [Emphasis mine.]

This observation no doubt appears even earlier in literature. I just happened to recall reading it in Smith.

I understand this.

[ONU CS Geek]

I currently work anywhere from 60 to 90 hours every week. This is on-the-clock time, not including time I spend doing paperwork, reading and studying for certifications, and answering calls from technicians that are in the field that have questions.

The first month it was hard getting myself into that schedule and way of life...now, if I take a day off in the week, my body wants to go and do things....

It's really sad...at one point in time, I worked to relieve stress....and now my secondary stress reliever is stressing me out.

WiFi at Coffee Shops

[cyliax]

I used to go to coffee shops to do productive work away from my email, etc... however, nowadays almost all of the coffee shops offer WiFi. Especially, the non-corporate shops seem to use free WiFi to draw people away from Starbucks. I guess now I have to rely on my "will-power" to prevent myself to get on the 'net, check Slashdot, read my email etc..., while "forcing" myself to relax and enjoy a Mocha. -ingo

Re:The trick is to make technology your slave

[jburroug]

Many of those emails aren't things that probably require his direct input, but email makes it (too) easy to keep people in the loop. This can have positive effects (e.g. the director sees something that needs to be fixed and thus avoids a problem) and negative effects (e.g. the director is swamped and can't give all of the emails the attention they deserve, though the senders think he has...).

Damn skippy. A lot of the people I work with are addicted to the CC: and BCC: headers. It not only makes it's far to easy for people to spam colleagues with unimportant updates, to "keep them in the loop" some people also become obsessed with staying in the loop on absolutely everything and require that you keep in them 'in the loop' on anything even tangentitaly related to their job. Even worse are the folks that feel compelled to respond to every single fucking 'in the loop email' they get.

Case in point. One lady I work with, my main point of contact with a client, actually. Routinely works 12-14 hour days. She never sends an email to just me either. Everytime she has a problem or a question about our services she CC's two or three people at her company, at least on member of our sales team and occaisonly someone in a department of my company completely unrelated to the issue at hand whom she vaguely remembers working with at one point in the distant past. Whatever it she emailed me about may take me 5-10 minutes to resolve/answer once I read it but she ends up innudated with emails on the subject, often long after it's a dead issue. It's no wonder she's working 12+ hour days, she's so saturated in email she can't get any real work done. Oh yea and because she's so obsessed with knowing absolutely everything that goes on with their contract with us everytime someone else from her company has to contact us with a question she get's CC'd in on it. Without fail while I'm working on a reply to the orignial query I'll get an email from her reminding me that so-and-so needs to have his/her problem fixed because this is all very important etc... I hate these irritating hypertasking fuckers.