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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."
I think to some extent we've got more technology than society has learned how to put to good use yet. E-mail in the workplace, for example, can be very destructive to productivity. 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. Being connected for the sake of being connected is no good.
I've found that when someone gets a text message in a pub it takes the priority over the guy sat across from the table. This is the technology working badly for you.. the guy who sent you the text message can wait.. the guy infront of you is more important.
My dad is around 50 years old but he's no technophobe. He says that the trick is to make the technology work for you . Make it your slave rather than your master. He doesn't leave his mobile phone on all the time but he turns it on to make a phone-call. He doesn't want to be contactable all the time but he wants to be able to contact others at any time. That's making the technology work for him!
Simon.
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Driving and talking on the phone. Obviously doing too much for the brain to handle.
Thank you for not posting a story that talks about Kerry vs. Bush, Republicans vs. Democrats, or US vs. Europe.
Anyone else misread this? If the amount of computing power were shrinking, I'd say we're all doomed...
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I go to a school with WLAN and free use of laptops in class. I have experienced sleeplessness from the days where I was too much online, and it has been a little bit harder to remember what the teacher said.
On the other hand, I have found that my laptop is great for taking notes on, and that it makes my classes a lots easier.
This is only anecdotal evidence, of course, but I have a lot of trouble concentrating on tasks other that coding or the like using a computer - essays spring to mind. /. springs to mind - I was able to concentrate on the task at hand much more effectively.
I actually cranked out a typewriter the other day to cut down on distractions, and I found it did work.
With no instant distractions -
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.
I'm not sure hypertaskers get stuff done faster. However they probably do have more fun doing several things at the same time. (How many of you are on IRC when you write code?)
[old fogey] It was 'more fun' to use a timesharing system, even though it was slower than an equivalently powered batch processing system. On those you had to wait for days before your turn came.[/old fogey]
Today's instant-gratification culture means it's more satisfying if your family/SO can contact you and communicate even when at work. Of course, some jobs (emergency medical respond teams etc) demand a high level of focus, but given the kind of desk jobs that abound today, it isn't surprising even technophobic folk are choosing to value connectedness over undistracted work.
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wait, my cell phone's ringing ...
...] "You've got mail!"
"Hello, er, hold on, my crackberry is buzzing"
[Check's ema,
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!"
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In my not so humble opinion, people that don't know when it makes sense to use technology and when it doesn't aren't the type that are going to be the most productive anyways.
Now there is the factor of adaptation. The MTV effect and all whereby we all learn to accept sub-second images in our commercials and music videos, lots of jump cuts, and so on. The brain does adapt, no question. So it wouldn't surprise me a bit to hear anecdotally of people who love this sort of hypertasking, and prove to be very productive at it. Good for them. But if you find yourself feeling stressed as you continually do three things at once, keep in mind that the brain is the brain and there is a limit to how far you can push it and still be productive and happy. We are all just rats in the corporate maze of life and sometimes we get irritated by the stresses.
When that happens, remember that many of you have the option to step back a bit. OK, so don't read the company email while sitting at Starbucks with an iPod blaring in your ear while you text your buddies on your cell phone. Makes you jumpy? Then pull out the ear plugs, sit in a quiet area instead of Starbucks, whatever you need to do. Leave the cell phone behind now and again. You are in control of your world, right, not the other way around?
Now I said "many of you" have that option so that I don't get flamed by the "you insensitive clod" types who feel trapped in a job that forces them into stressful circumstances. Do what you can. But remember, you do not have to feel like an experiment in evolution to see how far your brain can be stretched to cope with stress. Step back now and then and enjoy life.
The story quotes someone from MIT who did a study on something fairly simple; timing one's recognition response to colors and letters. The article tries to sensationalize it into a broad swath of "multitasking is inefficient.". Just what this means is totally unclear.
Be wary of anyone trying to simplify how humans think and work. No one understands the mind to any substantive degree--we have a hard time just figuring out how an ant's neurons fire when it walks.
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I've said this before, but I feel it bears repeating.
There is a difference between "being busy" and "being productive", and too damn many people don't know the difference.
I work with a guy who cannot go five minutes without being on the phone. He will be on business trips and call me to tell me how well a demo went. If there were no problems I really DON'T need to be interrupted in my work - it can wait until you get back, Rob. He will call me as he is driving in to work (a 10 minute drive) to tell me he wants to talk to me when he gets in.
He is the sort of person who feels that, if he is not talking to someone, writing a proposal, reading a proposal, etc., that he is not being productive.
Now, when he and I travel, I use the time waiting in the airport to review in my mind the things that will need to happen when we get to the customer, or long-range design plans, or just plain relax - so that when I need to work, I can do so at 100%.
All these people "hypertasking" - driving down the road making business calls that they have to "follow up on" because they cannot make proper notes, or don't have access to their information - in other words, wasting time. Wait until you can make the call, and resolve the issue with one call.
In short, be smart-lazy. Go read Heinlein's "The man who was too lazy to fail" in Time Enough For Love and be like him. When you do something, do it so as to spend as little work as possible to achive as much gain as possible. Sometimes, putting something off till tomorrow is better than doing it today (if putting it off will allow you to solve it once and for all, and trying to do it today means revisiting it tomorrow anyway).
People bitch about not having any "free time", yet every study done shows that we actually do have more "leasure time", but we fill it with so much crap that we have no "free time" left. If you feel overworked, if you feel like you have no free time, then examine all the things you do, and ask yourself "Do I *really* need to be doing this now, or am I just trying to be busy?"
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Hundreds of emails, floods of text messages, loads of IM buddies, PDA bulging with contacts, etc. Self importance and self worth are the order of the day. Kind of pathetic really.
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.
It's interesting to think of this as an opportunity for the "survival of the fittest" to apply. I have a co-worker who simply cannot focus without having several sensory inputs going on at once. By doing so, he can focus without distraction for long periods of time. He regularly works on 2-3 projects at once, and seems able to juggle an incredible number of simultaneous tasks. He's been diagnosed as ADHD.
Similarly, a good friend of mine (also diagnosed adult ADD/ADHD) who telecommutes by editing/publishing online comments keeps music blaring, and rarely has fewer than 10 windows open at a given time. She is constantly waiting for the computer (primarily the web server on the far side and/or her high-speed connection) to render results pages, and [Alt][Tab]s back and forth so fast it's almost impossible to keep up with what she's doing. If she's had caffiene... you'll get tired just watching her.
Perhaps we'll see people who have been labled "hyperactive" or "lacking focus" as the ones who will be magically productive in such environments. We may find that they're not distracted by such sensory overload--they may even be empowered by it.
If so, this will surely be a satisfying development for a large segment of the population that has traditionally been medicated toward being "normal." It may be that by allowing their brains to function the way they do without medication, they'll leave the rest of us in the technological dust.
Tim
The trick is not to let your life be run by the outside world, but interface with the outside world in a way that works best for you.
You get too many people calling you on the phone, or e-mailing you more than you have time to spend on answering them all? Get a secretary, and let him/her filter phone calls, e-mail or paperwork.
You want to focus on a particular activity? Tell people you work with, and don't ALLOW any interruptions during that activity. Business meetings are an example. Another example: I don't like being on the phone while I'm in busy traffic, or in the middle of shopping in a supermarket. Solution: I just leave my phone at home when I go out to buy groceries.
Don't let people grab your time whenever THEY feel like it, but give people the opportunity to do so when YOU're ready for them. In CPU terms: it might work better for you not to work in an interrupt-driven style, but use a polling method instead.
This is a nice idea, but the current trends in workplace design frequently make it impractical. For instance, my employer (Fortune 100 Corporation) recently renovated our building so that all of the programmers, managers, and technical people (everyone) lost private offices and went to cubes (53" walls on two sides, 60" wall on one). Our GM said we would be "surprised by the increase in productivity." He's right. If there's ever an increase in productivity, I'll be surprised.
My desk is now at a crossroads in the office, with our IT Admin behind me, and another project manager to my left. The cube design is such that ANYONE can lean over the main cube wall and start up a conversation. It matters not if I'm reading a complex technical spec, talking on a conference call, or simply staring at some code--anyone and everyone will strike up a conversation (that is, pull a non-maskable interrupt) about various topics.
To make matters worse, I'm a social person, who hates to seem rude or unsociable. In this environment, my willingness to socialize is my worst enemy. I have considered making a "DO NOT DISTURB" sign and putting it on the top edge of the cube wall. However, I'm quite certain our GM will have a fit over that, since by doing so, I'll be stifling "teaming opportunities."
I'd love to be back in a polling mode, but the new motherboard design allows no prioritization of NMI's, so I'm stuck.
Tim
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.
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Go to small, local diners. Sit by yourself. Bring a laptop, notebook, pen, etc. Have lunch. Have coffee. Take your time. Work at your leisure, but _do_ do work. Talk to the staff. Don't worry about distractions -- they're far fewer than, for example, the distractions of working at home (TV, games, family, hobbies like a guitar, etc.), and they're a LOT less likely to offer free WiFi access, which is a GOOD thing.
Also, the distractions caused by other human beings doing things around you are good. Embrace them, and it'll mean you're actually interacting with other _real_ human beings. That what life's about anyway. Community, family. Starbucks et al don't have that.
I go to work at the diner down the street every chance I get. It costs me lunch every time, and I'm sure it's not the healthiest food, but I accomplish far more that way, and I know when it's time to call it quits when my laptop battery is just about up. Then when I get home, I check my email, answer questions, and then my work day is done. Before I go, I check my email also. You don't have to have your email on all the time. You also don't need to work all the time. The amazing thing is that I used to work like crazy, because that's what small business owners do. Since I decided to stop that, because the lifestyle isn't sustainable, nor enjoyable, I'm much happier, and I get more done than I was before, both work-wise and in my personal life. I read again. I talk to my family. I see my friends. A world of difference.
Not to say I'm perfect or anything like that, or that I've got all the answers (yeah right! the only thing I know for sure is I ain't got a clue!), but it came down to the choice of living to work or working to live. And as much as I enjoy what I do, I don't live for it.
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In operating systems, it's called a context switch. A processor doesn't actually run a bunch of programs simultaneously; rather, it runs one program for a few nano- (or micro-, or other small fraction of a) second, then stores the data for future reference, loads another program (and its data), runs that one for a fraction of a second, and repeats this many times over the course of a second. If the programs never wait (for user input, or sleep for no particular reason), this is wasteful; a program which had the entire processor to itself would use it, but having to share with others means cycles get spent on changing tasks.
It would be more efficient to do batch processing, where the processor finishes one task (with 100% CPU utilization), then does a second task, then a third, and so on. For most programs, there is user I/O which takes much longer than that fraction of a second spent on any given program. This is also why you, the user, can't tell this is happening. For a computer, a context switch should take on the order of nanoseconds.
For a human, it's different. It has often been said that the human brain is like a computer, and this is a useful starting point here. This computer, though, takes much, much longer to do a context switch. For example, if I decide to call the Bobs, it's going to take me about about half a second to pick up the phone, a few seconds to find them in my address book (or dial the number), a few more seconds to let it ring, possibly up to 60 seconds for a voice mail greeting, and then I can start talking to them. The only task is to talk to the Bobs. If they're across the hall from me, it will take a few seconds to get over there. If they're in the same room, calling has a higher cost than talking directly to them. (Of course, interrupting them will cause them to do a context switch to talking to me, costing their productivity.)
Doing a task all at once prevents having to context switch to or from it. If I got up, make myself a sandwich, and eat it, I have used less time on the sandwich than I would if I got up, went to the refrigerator, took out some sandwich meat, put it on the counter, came back to the computer, read some Slashdot, went to the cupboard, got bread out, came back to the computer, wrote some of a program, went to the counter, made the sandwich, turned on the television, went back to the counter, picked up the sandwich, and ate it. The time in going to the refrigerator, coming back to the computer, going to the cupboard, coming back to the computer, went to the counter, turned on the television, and going back to the counter is all wasted. It would be much more efficient to make the sandwich, eat it, read Slashdot, write the program, then watch television (not necessarily in that order).
Even if I am already where I need to be (for example, changing from IRC to Slashdot to OpenOffice), there is an overhead cost in switching. There is also an overhead cost in changing my frame of mind; how I think like when programming is nothing like how I think when talking to friends.
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