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Multitasking Makes You Stupid and Slow
Reverse Gear recommends a long and interesting article over at The Atlantic in which Walter Kirn talks about the scientific results that support his claim and his own experiences with multitasking: that it destroys our ability to focus. "Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires — the constant switching and pivoting — energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we're supposed to be concentrating on... studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy."
I find it funny that so many people think they multitask well, even when it's obvious (watching them) that it's not true at all. My boss comes to mind - we were having a discussion where I brought up one of the previous studies showing that people just don't multitask well. He said something like "it's true most people don't - fortunately I'm one of the rare people that can handle doing several things at once". Thing is, it's obvious to all of us in our group that he has trouble finishing anything; but who's going to say that to his/her own boss?
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Perhaps it's more a combination of multitasking and immediate gratification. When you get everything you want quickly, there's no need to ever learn patience or persistence.
Seems more likely that switching between tasks just distracts you from noticing how poorly you're working.
It may be fine prose, but is lousy argumentation.
What has a nation's fighting on two fronts got to do with personal multitasking? It's spurious.
What sort of idiot is he to use a cell phone while driving? Around here it's illegal here to talk on a cell-phone while driving, unless using hands-free and even that's under scrutiny. because it has been well-quantified that a phone conversation does distract from driving.
Having said that, I tend to agree with the basic hypothesis, that trying to do two mentally demanding things at once is to do neither well. But that doesn't apply to listening to music while doing something else, or context switching when one has reached an impasse with one task.
I've always kind of laughed at the "must be able to multitask" requirements.
Ask yourself why they want that. In a lot of cases, it's because they want people to do the job of more than one person. It's the same reason they try to get people to work 70 hours a week (and, sadly, some of the people that work for them fall for it and even think it's "macho" to trade their entire waking life for a paycheck).
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If you're worrying/stressing about something it is no surprise it will help age you. If you worry about 70 things instead of 7, it's no surprise it'll stress and age you faster. I'd say modern life is what's doing that.
If you're multitasking there's also an overhead for switching tasks. Some of your thought is occupied by the mental juggling act. This is also no surprise.
However what's the alternative? Modern life doesn't give you large slabs of time where you get to concentrate on one thing. If something comes up at work or at home while we're in the middle of something else that's important, what do you do? Multitasking isn't something our brains weren't built for. If we couldn't multitask we'd be very easy prey - just distract us and have us for lunch.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Someone tags this story as obvious. Really? Is it really "obvious" what chemical processes the brain goes through during multi-tasking? Just because someone observed something through their personal experience doesn't mean that they have a scientific explanation for why it happens. This is about as absurd as tagging an article that talks about studies that show how the mechanisms within the Sun emit energy as "obvious" (because "like, oh my god, i already knew Sun was hot... I can't believe they spent money to study that").
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I find that I am much more effective when I multi-task at many computer related tasks since they often involve waiting. While there is some efficiency lost since I'm not always ready to respond when something is ready for input, and remembering where things were left off, there's a net gain in productivity since during those waiting phases I'm not just staring at a status bar. I would agree that just trying to do two things at the same time, both of which require your full concentration, will slow them down but there are many things in a work environment that don't. It isn't useful to just sit there doing nothing because you are at a wait state for your current job. Instead, do something else while you wait.
Computers have only accelerated the problem in some jobs, as they a great facilitators of even greater levels of multitasking, where you can do several different tasks at the same time.
Not necessarily by choice, but customer demands, supplier demands and fellow staff member demands all need to be fulfilled and earning a reputation for multitasking, just leads to ever greater demands being made upon you, until, burnout, you've made enough, and a single focused effort on doing nothing becomes appealing ;).
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I've always fund the habitual multi-taskers leave in their wake a series of tasks almost finished.
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"Sometimes a solution for task A comes from task B."
And you need to be doing A&B simultaneously in order to make the connection?!
I'm going to have to agree with the others: moderators are all multitasking.
...confusion, fatigue, and chaos...
Timing, control and balance - that's what an x-Hell's Angel told me were important to master. Without confusion, fatigue, and chaos, we'd have no need for timing, control and balance, and then where would we be on the ladder of evolution...
Some of us multi-task just fine. If you happen to be dyslexic like me, you need to multi-task, or you'd never get past addressing an envelope, much less licking a lousy stamp while you try to hold onto the darned thing.
This jives very well with what multitasking 'feels like' to me. Whereas on the one hand I can imagine how doing many things at once, switching the task that I am working on according to the availability of external resources necessary to complete the task, would produce maximal productivity, I find that whenever I attempt this I am left with an unpleasant mental feeling of stress that makes me *not want* to do this anymore.
For example, as a software developer, I find that there are often many things that I could be working on 'at once'. Say I have 10 bugs assigned to me, a major architectural investigation, two features that I am working on, a document or two that I need to write, and of course emails and phone conversations to keep up on.
In the past, I have tried to maximize my productivity by switching from one to the next each time something 'blocks' me from work on the one I am actively engaged in. For example, say that I've written a bunch of code and I'm ready to check it in. But whoops, I find that there is a 'build break' and I'm not allowed to check in until whoever was responsible for it fixes it. At this point, I could switch tasks to working on some other task that is independent of this; say, some other feature that I am coding up. In order to switch to the new task, however, I have to make some mental notes of what I was doing in the first task so that I can pick up where I left off (it might just be as much as remembering that I have to hit 'return' at the end of a command line that I've already typed in, just waiting for the green light to finish the checkin; or it may be significantly more - remembering that I have to re-test a bunch of stuff to make sure it's still working in combination with whatever changes have simultaneously occurred in the code base in between now and whenever I get back to checking this code in). Once switched to this new task, I could work for a little while, only to discover that some key piece of documentation is missing that would explain to me how to use someone else's API, and that the person I need to ask about this is out of the office for the day. OK, time to switch to a new task. Once again I have to store away enough information to be able to continue where I left off on this task when I get back to it; this could mean writing some comments in the code, or sending off an email to the person who is out of the office, the response to which will be enough context to remind me of what I was doing, and pick up where I left off, or maybe doing nothing except making a mental note that I have to re-read the code when I get back to it to remember what I was doing, assuming that when I read the code again, I will come to the same conclusions and once again seek out that person, who hopefully by this time will be back in the office. At this point, I switch to the new task of, say, working on some documentation. Eventually this task will be blocked in a similar way (maybe I will just get tired of working on the documentation - this happens pretty quickly because I hate writing documentation!), and I will have to task switch again, maybe to something new, maybe back to something I was already working on.
The amount of bookkeeping involved with retaining and then re-creating enough state to effectively work on multiple tasks at once is, in a word, exhausting. It is also stressful because one feels like one can at any moment 'forget' something important, and then lose track of a task completely, or maybe just lose track of enough information about a task that getting back to it will be much more work than it should have been. Combine all of this with the feeling that one has to stay very productive within this system in order to be seen as an effective employee, and it becomes very stressful, and mentally exhausting, indeed.
So as a result, my mind eventually starts to 'resist' doing this kind of multitasking; it does so my making me feel like I don't like multitasking. And usually I don't perceive it specifically as a desire not to multitas
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But on the other hand Women are better at multi-tasking than men because of the need for them to deal with multiple children at the same time.
That was a problem at work for me some time ago. Now, I know that a tolerance for interruptions depends upon one's personality and job. However, as a software developer, I liken it to someone building a house of cards, and then having some well-meaning idiot knock it down every half hour or so. Incredibly frustrating and annoying.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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Er... As someone with an IQ of 159 you should realize that you are abnormal, and that writing articles addressed only to such a minority of people would be rather... absurd. Actually I don't think your subjective experience can really be generalized to other people with high IQs. For example, I've got a pretty decent IQ myself (153), and generally try NOT to multitask, I'd rather handle one situation at a time. I think its called hyperfocus, which pretty much turn tasks into "flow" like experiences. Intelligence does not lead to one style of expression, there still is tons of neural baggage, and experiences, that will shape your strategy of using it.
Granted multitasking comes in handy, since I've noticed that most intelligent people get bored easily, and thus have a need to create their own stimulus.
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Well the average "multi-tasking" that I have encountered in the modern workplace is not of the type you describe.
.1ms, but even for trivial tasks (like I'm cooking spaghetti sauce in this pan, *INTERRUPT--The water is boiling* CONTEXT SWITCH, put noodles in water, lower heat, *INTERRUPT--Sauce simmering too vigorously* CONTEXT SWITCH, stir sauce) Even something simple like that the context switches will take 1-5 seconds, many thousands of times slower than a CPU, and those context switches have next to zero data overhead associated with them. Context switching is not cheap in silicon, and it is a lot less cheap in my experience in carbon.
Currently I am a member of 4 dev teams, working on 4 different products. It is 100% ineffective frustrating, and stressful (but so management has decided to structure the teams, most of the devs here are on at least 2 or 3 teams). Sure, at any one time I'm only working on 1 thing, because you can't physically type in 4 different windows at the same time. However, it is extremely difficult to get ANYTHING done. On a day where I have zero interruptions, and am able to focus and work on a single product all day, I can probably produce 1-2k lines of working code (given that the features are just in need of coding, and there isn't a lot of "ok let me think about this for 3 hours to figure out the best way to do it", if there is design/algorithm work obviously not as much code gets written, but this is even harder work to context switch on). However, I get a day like that maybe once a month, and its usually a saturday. On a regular day, even with prioritized task lists, when I have to touch 2 of the 4 products in single day, I probably can only produce 5-600 lines of working code total, it cuts my productivity in half, just the 1 context switch. Most days (probably 4 of 5) I touch all 4 products each day... Under these circumstances, I can only produce 1-200 lines of actual working code.
Context switching in software development is EXTREMELY expensive. Just like in this guy's driving example, what he is describing while his car careens off the road and he's still thinking "where did the phone go? I wonder if it was a nude pic?" is a context switch. Context switching even in SMP machines is expensive and they are designed for this purpose. It is the reason why there are limits to improvements you can achieve through parallelism. For some processes/tasks sure you can fully parallelize them, but there are plenty of tasks, and I'd argue the majority of creative type work (programming, system design, network design, research, book writing, painting, song writing, etc) are of the type which cannot be context switched easily.
Sure I can pay my bills and book a vacation online at the same time, but programming in parallel is a big no no. Our brains were not designed as and are not SMP computers, they aren't even very good preemptive multitasking machines (a single processor computer). A decent CPU can probably context switch in
This seems to tacitly presume the old urban legend that there are vast areas of the brain that most people don't use, which has been widely debunked. http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/10percent.asp
It also seems to suggest that Chinese philosophers of, say, no later than the 7th century CE had a substantial knowledge of the physical structures of the brain as well as an understanding of the anatomical mapping of brain areas to their specific functions. This is a concept that, in the first place, wasn't suspected in Europe until the late Middle Ages and, in the second place, continued to be rejected by Chinese medicine long after that, in favor of such concepts as energy meridians, and so forth. I think it's more likely that since almost any nerve structure resembles, at least superficially, almost any tree, the symbolism is probably a modern back-formation.
I don't doubt that you're correct when you credit the cerebellum with helping coordinate martial arts techniques by encapsulating complex motions at a lower layer of organization than the conscious mind. But these are motor skills. The same effect occurs when one learns to ride a bicycle. As long as maintaining control is a conscious act it is nearly impossible. Once it becomes unconscious it is trivially easy. But stretching this point to apply to "prophets and seers" is, as you have noted, fairly esoteric and mystical, rather than scientific.
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Try muscle memory. Your base instincts/reflexes in many martial arts situations will lead to problems. They have to be controlled by training 'new' stuff over it. I am a wreslter, and when I get into the fight, its as if I was thinking without thinking. There are points in wrestling which definately takes 'thinking' (such as timing your attacking, picking exact counters, and sequencing your moves), yet you're not really thinking about it. They just seem to flow, and its all very beautiful and amazing.
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There's a 'brightness' control on my TV but I turned it all the way up and everything is still stupid.
All those IQ points, and you still aren't smart enough to keep it to yourself...
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I would add the following: Given that at the time the Buddha statues were first built, people had no idea that the brain is the organ responsible for thinking (rather than the heart, or the stomach, or the soul etc), it's therefore revisionist nonsense to claim that the Bodi-Tree is a symbol for the cerebellum.
what's interesting, is the precepts of many martial arts are explains in an "esoteric and mystical" way (chi, an explanation I have always hated), and yet a large majority of them have come to be verified, not debunked, by modern science... even though the precepts were developed long before modern physics or biology. While the scientific method may not have been used, that does not mean their knowledge was wrong in essence.
that is not to say that they are all correct presumptions. However, in the case of "energy meridians", of which I am also a skeptic, there does remain the fact that acupuncture is an AMA-approved treatment for several ailments now... even though it cannot be explained with our current understanding, even by the placebo effect. In general, I do not find it incredible that early eastern understanding of many things was far beyond what one would expect given a lack of scientific rigor... they would often have the "right idea" explained "strangely". don't mistake my lack of conviction that it is all "fakery" make you think I am an advocate for either a chi or meridian based explanation for any kind of phenomena... but neither am I going to dismiss and ignore it all when it has worked for thousands of years to some degree at least, without a serious look.
I am not a big proponent of the imagery representing a "cerebellum" though (the same physical forces that create leaf/tree structures create everything else... similarities are inevitable). And I fully agree that many of the "feats" of martial arts is simply motor reflex training and conditioning. However, the mental discipline taught by many arts does eventually allow for a state beyond mere reflex, where you can invent new maneuvers and react in ways outside of your reflex conditioning, with something that is both conscious and also unconscious.. that is, just conscious enough to direct the overall intent and action, and simply "allowing" that action to come to pass rather than executing it consciously. It's a fine line, to be sure, but I think a significant one.
It's very similar to being "in the zone" with any sport, challenge, etc. You are not mechanically producing actions you have rotely programmed into your muscles or mind. Some part of what you are doing is that.. and some is still conscious, but without disturbing your ability to "unconsciously" make your intention happen, even when your intended maneuver is nothing you have practiced, or is a combination of several practiced movements broken down and reassembled in a new way.
That, I think, is what the OP is talking about. Perhaps it's not "calling 100% on the cerebellum", but it is definitely a different state of mind than normal, that allows for much faster and truer reaction speed to any given situation when "active". and the better you are, the more you can "turn it on" at will. Having reached that state only by accident, I can say it's not surprising that people tend to reach for anything they can to explain it, and that any attempt at explanation might sound a little weird to non-practitioners, but they are on the mark with noting that it's not just reflex at least and is something much more interesting. something we have not articulated in the west with our scientific predilections yet, and something that the eastern descriptions of which leave me unsatisfied as well.
IQ testing is pseudo-science. For starters the testing is never independent of your previous problem solving experience so those that have seen similar problems before will have an advantage.
Instead of focusing on an IQ number, how about asking ALL your students what they're going to do with their abilities?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Yes, but their bosses loved them. People who say they can multi-task well, and who succeed in keeping the things they're juggling from hitting the ground at least until they're out the door, are highly regarded by management. The guy who says up front that the expectations are unrealistic isn't going to get promoted. Ergo--everyone pretends to multitask well.
But driving and talking on the phone, wether or not with a hands-free set, doesn't work well. I threw out my hands free set and stopped using the phone in the car because I had just a few too many near-accidents while I was talking on the phone. Talking and driving are two very independent tasks but I think both use either too much processing power, or they both use the same area of the brain for whatever reason, which makes you bad at both.
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Revisionist mysticism!
Everybody respect the awesome wisdom of the ancients, now that it's been "reinterpreted" to agree with the tacky knowledge of our time.
It's not surprising at all that non-scientific approaches get some things right, occasionally. The ancients figured out very well that things fall when you hold them in the air and then let go. Of course they were invariably wrong about why, and for the longest time they thought that heavier things fall faster.
Some pre-scientific medical treatments might actually work, sort of, as well. But more either don't do anything, are actively harmful or are hammers looking for nails.
Science is, among other things, the way we make sure that our imaginations aren't getting the better of us.
Time management is, at its base, the ability to tell someone "no" when they ask you to do work. You say "no" because you have 100% of the feasible work load when that person wants you to do some more. NOTE: another error is that 100% is the maximum workload: it isn't. 80% is about the maximum, 100% can be maintained for a short while, 110% for even less time. You need bathroom breaks, informal talks (meetings arranged are already included in your work schedule), you may be sick or late because of an accident (and working late just makes you less productive, even though it's more productive than going home, but then again, you won't feel like working 100% if you've had to work late the week before).
Management think that time management is about you doing what they told you to do and making space for when they change their minds. It isn't. You should already have an idea of what effort work takes and your schedule is filled. At that point, time management is about how to say "no".
In an atmospheric environment, heavier items do indeed fall faster. try dropping a sheet of paper and an equivalently sized piece of sheetmetal if you don't believe me. Hell, some items are so light that they don't fall at all, like balloons.
I was disappointed to read your reply here, because it made it clear that you are part of the problem identified by the parent, rather than part of the solution. You are taking as axiomatic that "MEETING THE SCHEDULE" is the Prime Directive, and you make all your subsequent reasoning subservient to that.
Well one cannot argue against axioms. If your entire existence revolves around "getting product out the door" as you wrote then there is little point in discussing any of the higher goals of management.
You write: " schedules have to mesh, product has to go out the door in a timely fashion."
How simplistic, and how lacking in recognition that you are dealing with people and non-deterministic problems, not with a robot assembly line executing fixed-duration, tightly-specified tasks. You really are part of the problem in industry.
You might like to consider that some of your professional colleagues might have different goals: to do their work to professional standards, or to learn effectively as part of their career progression, or to do some task in a more generic way to benefit future work, as examples. Good managers don't brush aside such divergent inconveniences in the name of meeting deadlines. Only poor managers treat their people as dumb cogs in a machine.