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Multitasking Considered Detrimental
djvaselaar sends along an article from The New Atlantis that summarizes recent research indicating that multitasking may be detrimental to work and learning. It begins, "In one of the many letters he wrote to his son in the 1740s, Lord Chesterfield offered the following advice: 'There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.' To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one's time; it was a mark of intelligence... E-mails pouring in, cell phones ringing, televisions blaring, podcasts streaming--all this may become background noise, like the 'din of a foundry or factory' that [William] James observed workers could scarcely avoid at first, but which eventually became just another part of their daily routine. For the younger generation of multitaskers, the great electronic din is an expected part of everyday life. And given what neuroscience and anecdotal evidence have shown us, this state of constant intentional self-distraction could well be of profound detriment to individual and cultural well-being."
a bit trksey to typ wif on hand while im ... oh lookie shiny ponies!
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
I suggest you read Slashdot
News at 11.
How we know is more important than what we know.
It's a reasonable statement to make, and I can agree with it, in general terms. Generalisations, while usually true, can't be applied to everyone. I actually find it harder to focus on one thing when there is only one thing to focus on. I can't even read a book without the dull murmur of a TV with the volume turned down just on the edge of my awareness. On the other hand, I can't concentrate on anything when there's an infomercial on...
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
I have absolutely no problems with...
hold on a minute...
multitasking. It makes me...
one second...
much more efficient, because I can handle...
sorry about this...
many different tasks at once
Apparently it affects memory as well. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/27/2221228&from=rss
CNN Article from 2001
It's not a bug, it's a feature
...it's been found that most guys already have a great tool for all this mono-tasking, Selective Hearing.
/. opens up the "no shit Sherlock!" department.
Details at eleven!
In other words, I should wipe my drive and install MS DOS.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
I kept telling people that these new multitasking operating systems were inferior back in the 90's, but they never listened! Maybe now they'll realize how right I was.
Quote from the article:
I think the key here is forced. When I'm solving a problem or trying to learn something, I find that I am more effective if, after each noticeable success in my effort, I take a little break and do something else, such as read a Slashdot story, while my brain thinks about what I just learned or did. I'm much less effective if I have to work straight through on a long problem or learning task.
In other words, I multitask fine if I've picked N tasks, that I can switch among freely, whenever I want to switch. However, if the tasks are forced upon me, or I have to switch on a schedule or in response to interrupts, such as phone calls, then productivity goes down.
multitasking provides a much needed break from specific tasks allowing you to maintain a certain level of output longer without burning out.
I think this is way too narrow. I can't really say since this was a fairly crappy writeup and not the original research itself, but just because in a narrow set of constraints multi-tasking equals less performance, doesn't mean overall it is worse. I think there's three main things not considered here:
1) Just because you perform both tasks worse, doesn't mean it's less efficient. An example would be driving while talking on the cell phone. There's little debate that your driving skills are worsened when you do this, as you simply have less concentration to go around. Ok, fine, but that doesn't in fact mean it is detrimental to efficiency. If you need to drive somewhere that takes 20 minutes, and you need to set up something over the phone that takes 20 minutes, you save time doing both at once. Even if because you aren't concentrating as much on either it takes 25 minutes to complete both, you are still ahead.
I realise with driving there is a safety consideration in this case, but I am talking overall about task performance.
2) Many tasks involve waiting. There are plenty of things in work, particularly computer work, that involve waiting. You'll give input and have to wait before you can give it again. It is not efficient to just sit there and stare at the screen. It is more efficient to work on multiple tasks. You work on another task, and periodically check on the first one to see when it needs input (this would be similar to how an OS multitasks on a single processor). Yes, no single task will get done as fast but you'll get more done in a given amount of time.
3) Sometimes you need to move away from something for awhile to be able to do better at it. I find this is true when I'm writing certain things. I can't just sit there and write the thing straight out. I can either stare in to space, or I can go ahead and do something else for a bit then come back to it. I'm not talking about needing an over all work break here, just that I need a bit to switch away and then come back. This is particularly true of editing. If I want to read over something I've written for errors, doing so right away does no good. I need to switch to something else for a bit, then come back.
As a simple example of where I've seen multi-tasking work much faster due to tasks that don't require constant input was setting up some software in a lab. Our management system was broken and we needed some new software in a lab right away for a presentation. So I grabbed one of our student workers and had him come help. We'd each take a row of computers and start doing installs by hand. He did everything sequentially, sitting at one computer and doing all the steps until it was done. I multi-tasked, dancing back and forth between 3-4 computers at once all at different stages of the setup. I ended up doing over twice the number of rows as him.
The reason was this was a perfect place to multi-task. The setup involved a fair bit of waiting on things before giving input, so rather than wait I'd go on to the next one. Thus the job got done quicker.
that many of my friends, and sometimes even myself, find it uncomfortable in genuinely quiet settings. While it is a useful skill to be able to keep track of more than one or two things at a time, it seems almost habit-forming. A good friend of mine seems to basically invent things to do so that he doesn't ever get "stuck" with one task at a time, which he says is boring.
The most annoying thing I can think of is when I'm at my job or in labs at school, and people come at me with a bunch of different requests, all expecting me to drop everything and get it done 'like now!'. Yes, I can manage several things at once, but sometimes properly managing things means doing them one at a time, carefully. Providing it's not a pressing issue, I wish people would be okay with the answer 'I'm just finishing up my current task, I will get to the next one as soon as I'm done'.
i spend far too much time online, typing up reports with rhythmbox, slashdot, and pidgion going in the background.
but i dont even notice it all anymore, i just jump between things without thinking.
i used to be able to focus on one task for a long time. a few years ago, i could go and paint non-stop for 12 hours straight and wonder where the time went. now after 2 hours, i am fighting boredom and i have to get up and walk around, and just do something else. i now find it impossible to do only one thing for a long period of time.
but for research and learning, i find it helps to multitask, study many unrelated things all at once for an hour or so, then take my mind off it for a while and do something mindless. my brain will usually start finding (or inventing?) connections and relationships between these unrelates things.
in short, for me:
multitask doing = ad
multitask learning = good
your results may vary.
-I only code in BASIC.-
I'm reading /. frontpage, listening to a George Carlin standup youtube video (R.I.P.), chatting to three people on two protocols and waiting for a reply to an SMS I just sent.
Not really being very productive at all, unsuprisingly.
For those that don't get it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful
Paul Graham recently wrote an essay about a related topic just last May, on distractions. It seems that he even works by actually disconnecting his computer from the Internet while working, in order to reduce the amount of distraction that would come from use of the Internet, and using a separate machine somewhere else that had Internet access for those times when he really needs to do something online. It's a radical idea. Maybe it explains why I feel bit more productive while working from home, where Internet access can only be had by hooking my cellphone up to a special SIM card that has a data plan, and connecting to the Net via Bluetooth. With such awkward steps needed to get a working Internet connection, and with no coworkers to bother me, distraction is kept at a minimum. Whereas at the office the lawyer who's sharing our office space has a television permanently tuned to a news channel, I get distractions from coworkers up the wazoo, and a fast broadband connection which basically encourages me to read and post to Slashdot and engage in other diversions...
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
I find I am most productive when I am only working on one thing. I can focus all of my attention on it and wrap my brain around the subtle aspects of the problem at hand.
The problem with task switching is that one has to dig back down into the task after every interruption. This wastes time.
If I start to feel burned out on the thing that I am working on, I put it down and pick up something else. I forget all about the previous task and turn my focus on the new task.
I also find that alternating between difficult, time consuming tasks, and light easy ones, is effective because you give your head a break, and also you are turning over items on your TODO list, which makes the boss happier because he sees that you are making progress. Often the boss starts to get restless if you are buried in a tough time consuming task and he sees no progress for long periods.
This way of working requires more structure. You have to prioritize carefully, otherwise the items on the bottom of your TODO list will never get done.
Now that my compile is done, I can get back to work.
As said by Charles Emerson Winchester III:
"I do one thing, I do it well, and I move on."
What a great show MASH was. Sadly, judging by what's followed from the major networks in the years since, it seems to have been one of the last gasps of truly quality TV series.
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
not being able to walk and chew gum at the same time was a sign of some one that wasn't too bright. So Brittany Spears is really a genius or at least really focused?
Most people can't even do a single job at a time competently, because they can't concentrate very well on anything. Some people can switch concentration among several focused subjects. Some of those people benefit from the subconscious working away while their conscious is working on the foreground task. And some of those people need so much stimulation at both conscious and subconscious levels that they need to multitask to stay interested at all. And of that last refined group, some of them work better when so stimulated and loaded up.
Yes, very productive smart people are the elite of the elite. Don't try this at home - professional driver on a closed course (not really, but we tell you that so you don't hurt yourself trying to keep up).
But of course the dumber people can't relate, and will first all try to do what smart people make look easy, and then will try to tell everyone, including the smart people, that one should try.
Fortunately, running circles around dumb people is what really smart people eat for breakfast.
--
make install -not war
I am working on a workspace replacement for myself. I need a graphical environment but all the window managers and environments I know of, starting from KDE, via icewm, twm, to ion, they all share a set of problems I try to get rid of with my own creation. One aspect of my work is a single task environment.
In the meanwhile I use KDE ripped to the bare bone:
- no desktop icons as it's stupid to use the desktop for any other task than to place ones application on it. Who puts all his stuff from the real world desk to write something directly on its surface or to search some information there?
- no menu as it's stupid to organize ones work by the available applications and not ones data.
- a few buttons in the panel to access the most important applications easily when using the mouse. The shortcuts are more important though...
- a clock as it's convenient to just look at the clock for a second than to disrupt work by typing in a command to get the same information.
- only one desktop as it's highly disruptive to organize ones work using these.
- no task bar. I have one application at any given time. There is no need to know, if there are any other applications open. I am within my workspace and when I have finished a task I will change the workspace and at that point in time I will know where to find the tools for that task.
cb
News at 11.
People seem to think that geniuses are simply more intelligent than the rest of us, I hear talk of IQs of 200, 250 etc. Which is utter bullshit, there aren't enough people on the planet for that, never mind the validity of IQ tests. What you really see when you take a look at the life of a genius is damned near monomania. The drive, ability and desire to focus on a single thing for years, decades, to the exclusion of almost everything else. To the point that they finally see "the truth" or at least, closer to the truth than the rest of us who are more distracted by daily life.
Not to say that geniuses aren't spectacularly talented people, obviously they are, but what really makes the difference is focus.
Deleted
I shouldn't be posting this...
Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
Simple calculations of how much time is cost indicated long ago that disrupting highly skilled workers was detrimental to their work. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html
I debated using that example because I knew some jackass would start crying about the safety aspect rather than what is pertinent to the argument. I am not advocating talking on the phone in a car, I am using it as an efficency example, since they used it.
However, if you are unable to set emotion aside and evaluate it objectively then let's go for walking and talking on your phone. Again, you will find that one interferes with the other, you'll probably walk slower and such as you are thinking about your conversation as well as where you are going, you may have to stop to dial or press keys in response to auto prompts and such. That doesn't mean that it is going to be more efficient to get to where you are going, then pull out your phone and make your call. Despite both tasks suffering, there is still an overall gain.
That is the point here. I'm not talking about safety, that's a separate issue.
Certainly, the smart phone can be a device that helps productivity. But in my experience, it seems that it has a negative impact on productivity for many people. I watch people try to read email during a meeting, and end up doing neither task well. I watch people spend over 20 minutes trying to read one page of text, after picking up the blackberry every 30 seconds to reply the email. I would think that they would be far more effective in meetings, reading papers, and participating in meetings if they did each one at a time.
If they were unemployed it could be beneficial to efficiency. In fact, next time take a trip by the old-peoples home, you could really increase the world's efficiency then.
"Multitasking may be detrimental to work and learning" says 18th Century man. "Verily, this is why women should not be permitted work or learn!"
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
Kind of sad if you really didn't get it... I hope that was just "more joke."
I just wrote something on the superiority of written matter over video because written matter has numerous advantages that relate to focus and reflection. I value these things. Right at that time, I ran into this very article (I mean the one TFS refers to), I found it a horrifying thing to read — like reading someone's report of losing their own mind.
Since I wrote it up, I've been paying attention to how others pay attention, and I've seen a few things that signify, at least to me, that the problem is widespread.
For instance, I introduced our youngest boy (he's in his twenties) to some music that is in his line of interest (he plays bass, this musician I was showing him is a fabulous bassist) and he listened for, oh, maybe 15 seconds before he began to talk about music, which segued quickly into other areas. I didn't answer him; he just took off on his own.
Before the piece had finished playing, he was completely off on something else, and he had no idea what I was talking about afterwards when I asked him direct questions about the bass techniques demonstrated in the cut.
It was disheartening, to say the least.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
...
Single-tasking is the new Multi-tasking
Multi-tasking is efficient when used appropriately.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Just in, man stabs himself in mouth with BBQ fork instead of beer, while barbequeing. The dangers of multitasking,News at 8.
War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.- Shelley
If you have ADD, you'll naturally be good at multitasking and this article does not apply to you.
This article applies to those who have the new disorder, multitasking deficit disorder.
She gets upset while I read, when engaging in crongressional activities?
You raise an interesting point. TFA says "In one of the many letters he wrote to his son in the 1740s, Lord Chesterfield offered the following advice:
So, how the fsck could he have written to his son if his *first* son, who inherited the title, wasn't born until 15 years after that decade?
ah, good someone has quantified it. My opinion is that it is longer than 15 minutes, but that is the right ballpark
Before I start, yeah, I do subscribe to the POV that IQ tests are just a trainable skill, and thus measure only... how good you are at IQ tests. Plus, I don't think one number is anywhere near able to sum up the gamut of human skills and abilities and talents.
That said, I do seem to recall that there _are_ differences in the brain wiring of different people. E.g., IIRC it was even linked here on Slashdot that Asperger's Syndrome causes neurons to form more connections and be much more reluctant to break old connections. E.g., they seem to have found a gene responsible for ADHD, which, again, causes the brain to work differently.
And in the end, is it that big a surprise? How your whole body looks like, and how it works, is dictated by some proteins which are encoded by some genes. E.g., we already identified, say, the protein which is encoded differently for a human brain as opposed to a chimp brain. And sometimes seemingly unrelated proteins affect the various pathways and reactions. E.g., a broken MC1R doesn't just give you red hair, but also has effects including different fight-or-flight priorities and pain sensitivity.
Because "God" doesn't seem to believe in neat, orthogonal, cohesive coding. Or rather, because we're the result of some random mutations that worked. If modifying another protein to fix the effect of the first works too, chances are you get that instead of fixing the first one. We're the result of some billions of years of spaghetti code and layers upon layers of hacks, that often address the symptoms instead of the real problem. We even have pieces of DNA that seem to be both code and data segment (very loosely using those terms, anyway.) We have deliberately self-modifying code, fer crying out loud. (That's how the immune system can match almost any foreign protein.)
At any rate, there are a lot of genes at work there. There are mutations in every generation. There are recessive traits. Etc. So it's not that far fetched that some people's brains would be wired slightly differently.
Whether that's good or bad, if up for debate. And, yes, IQ isn't measuring that. But you can't say that everyone has the same brain and only differs in how focused they are.
Heck, even that focus itself seems to be often a result of genes. E.g., Asperger's Syndrome has a narrow focus of interest as one of its almost invariant symptoms. The ability to hyperfocus is right behind on that list. So even that goes back to genes and brain wiring, it seems.
Basically, I dunno, I have no problem believing that some people _are_ born smarter. Again, it may not be measured by IQ, but I believe it's happening.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Now, what was I doing before reading this slashdot article...
I do this daily, for my whole life. I have to create tangible markers to thought fragments because otherwise I get led into byways that *do* need addressing, and lose all hope of finishing the first task. This is compounded because I am a technical admin for my company, so I am expected to shield the line managers from some distractions.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Who dat say True Dat?
(Nod to an old WWII joke.)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Here is my complete speculative analysis on multi-tasking.
Just take a look at human evolution. Do you think that being "extremely focused" is a really good survival trait? Being able to do more than "one thing" at a time would seem to be a much more advantageous, in the greater scheme of things, than being able to focus at the detriment of other things. Human beings are meant to multi-task. Staying alert for potential predators while gathering food seems like a top notch trait to carry on. Human beings are at the top of the totem pole not because we are physically superior, but because we are mentally superior. Our ability to out think more physically capable predators is not only because we are smart, but also because we are cognsaint of more than one thing going on at a time, and are better able to process that information.
It seems more likely that the "genius" trait, while desirable for geek credit, is really not a trait that evolution seems to favor.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
Yet in the information age, our entire economy is built around needing people who have mastered segments of information that are not "Google-able". To get that level of comprehension they had to spend real effort processing it in their learning time.
Multi-Tasking is fun for office designers, but someone forging new paths needs that same time to think so that they too can answer spot questions later.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It might be cumulative.
I can get past the first couple interruptions, but after a series of them the backlash sets in, with the subconscious mood "why bother to concentrate at all today?"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
That I CAN'T walk and chew gum .... (Smacks into wall trying to do both...)
Seriously, you CAN multi task just fine if one task is primarily PHYSICAL and the other MENTAL I play video games while riding a stationary bike for example. I fold socks while watching TV. BUT the more mental stuff you do at the same time is what causes problems...at least in my own case.
Oh yes, and my high IQ DOES prove I am better than all of you so there! PFFFFH! ;-) ;-) ;-)
While it may be detrimental to the quality of work, multi-tasking may significantly _improve_ efficiency; if all tasks involved can be done without one's full concentration, you can end up saving a lot of time. Therefore, a good compromise would seem to be someone who can focus when needed and multi-task at other times. Does anyone know of any research on whether focusing and multi-tasking ability are actually mutually exclusive?
When I first started driving, it took all my conscious, active effort to pay attention to everything on the road and this is just driving in the sedate neighborhood. The interstate had me utterly intimidated for the first year. I would not have the radio on, not talk to passengers, was totally white-knuckled focused. As I got better at it, the process became automatic and I could drive, talk to people, and it didn't hurt my driving performance at all. If tricksy situations arise, I'll tune out on any conversation and be focused just on the road. Of course, many people screw up by devoting more attention to the conversation (or makeup, or food) than the road. Nothing irritates me more than the kind of people who feel they have to maintain eye contact with a passenger while driving. NO! ROAD! CONCENTRATE!
People can juggle multiple low-level tasks. Walk or ride a bike while listening to a book on tape, get a big meal moving in the kitchen while singing along with music, just fine. A high level and low level task can be combined like driving and audio books. But it falls apart when multiple high-level tasks are competing. It's very difficult to, say, follow along with a TV show and write at the same time. There's no way in hell that the typical office multitasker gets anything done. These are the people you have direct conversations with and retain nothing because they're thinking about something else. My personal pet peeve, blackberries in meetings. STOP! There's no fucking way you're keeping up with what I'm talking about when you're typing with your thumbs. Check your berry to make sure it isn't a server calling for help and if it isn't, put the damn thing away and pay attention!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
This is a classic case of what's good for 88% of the population being exported to all people. In fact, if you are right-handed (88% of us) then your left-hemisphere is dominant and you do not benefit from multitasking. However, if you are left-handed (12% of humans), then your right-hemisphere (the image side) is dominant and it is perfectly acceptable for you to multitask. Why? The left hemisphere of the brain (the language side) is optimized to process linear sequential information. In right-handed individuals, the linear side is dominant. The left side is optimized to do one thing at a time. If a right-handed person is in the middle of a task and they break that off to do something else, they must return to the beginning when they resume the interrupted task. In left-handed people, the right-hemisphere (the image side) is dominant. That hemisphere is optimized to process visual-simultaneous information. Breaking off one task while in the middle of another task is possible. The left-handed/right-brained individual can resume where they left off, thereby making multitasking efficient. This is why, for example, we see left-handed people way over-represented in the presidential contests. Currently, both Barack Obama and John McCain are left handed. So, while I'm sure this article is statistically accurate, it glosses over some complexities that have only come to light in past few years.
Meyer and Friedman called it part of the symptoms of the Type A Stress Syndrome. It's eventual result is coronary heart disease from plaques via ACTH secretion. It causes time-urgency and stress, and the fight/flight syndrome.
Multitasking is keenly sought because it also heightens brain activity, which some people crave. The downside is that it's really stressful, according to research done decades ago.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Cognitive theory and the field of Education pretty much prove the premise of this story wrong. Getting things into long term memory from working memory almost requires multi-tasking, as the brain processes things better when it is engaged in multiple ways. There is a limit, however, which is what this article might be getting at...I just don't see it that way. I see it as the old grumpy man yelling for all those kids to get off his lawn.
Works very effective.
Another thing: I work 1 day a week not at the office, but at home using VPN. Less people at my desk, less phone calls. Somehow that is always the day I do the most of the work for that week.
I have got a few scares on my body which tell me that such people should lose more than their license, and that rather quickly at the second offense, if not even first. To all those cell phone user in car, speeder, and so on : get lost.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
If you follow TFA links (which includes the sneaky commission referral from newatlantis), it leads to a book on Amazon called "The 4 Hour Workweek".
If you travel that link and read the first review, it includes some very accurate information about this global outsourcing issue we're all facing as we try to cram even more work into a finite span of time:
Well put.
Of course, nowadays, multitasking is a corporate buzzword which mainly means that you have to do the actual task you were hired to do, but also usually do a lot of other bureacratic, time consuming stuff at the same time. It's why people are happy when they can work outside of their primary hours and actually get things done.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
You're not much of an (armchair) evolutionary biologist. You see, when talking about evolution, it's all about the species, not individuals and about hundreds of generations, not years or decades.
If multitasking really had evolutionary advantages in humans, it would have been selected for, not against.
Humans evolved from other highly-social species - a social group works most efficently when everyone in it has one or at most two narrowly specialized tasks they're good at and do all the time; worker ants don't usually fight well, fighter ants suck at carrying stuff.
Imho, the evolutionary pressure towards this kind of specialization is sure to produce individuals who are able to focus well.
Oh, if only there were solitary predators with intelligence levels comparable to those of humans, so that we might test them to see if they are good at multitasking, thus proving my theory... oh wait, there aren't any. Proof by reduction?
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
Detrimental but we do it anyways... alcohol, tobacco, television, fighting, preservatives, pets we're allergic to, driving old, inefficient cars... name one thing you do in a day that doesn't involve putting something into your body or putting it back out that is completely necessary.
Even if we get two things done less efficiently than if we did each of those things separately, we're still getting two things done at the same time. This seems perfectly fine for two jobs that don't have to be done perfectly or rapidly.
It doesn't matter anyhow, even if it is bad for us it's still human nature to push the limits of our thinking, even if it's regularly over what we can do.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
You can't take the sky from me...
1. Some managers believe that people who want quiet and concentration at work are troublemakers.
2. HR-types consider task-oriented workers and thinkers dangerous to morale and workplace cohesion. I guess that's because task-oriented people get TOTALLY FED UP WITH EVERYONE'S CONSTANT PRATTLING and don't mind saying it once in a while.
3. OT, but the word 'Meebo' is nearly as stupid as 'Druple'; Lutherans have been doing ubuntu for years.
Your right about that, I am not much of an armchair evolutionary biologist. I'm just taking stabbing guesses for the sake of amusement.
However, you speak about specialization as if it is a path to evolutionary success, when it seems history is full of specialization losers. The more focused a species is towards one particular aspect of their survival, the more likely that species is destroyed due to change. Humanity is the top of the change specifically because we can adapt. Adaption seems to be contradictory to extreme focus.
You state that if multitasking had evolutionary advantages in humans, it would have been selected for, not against. I see no evidence that would show that humans are not multi tasking creatures. I know it is tempting to judge evolution by the trend of a dozen or even hundred of years, but you must look at human evolution of the course of tens of thousands of years, if not more, to distinguish trends.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
The demand of modern life is that people be able to handle tasks in unison, to micromanage their thought processes, and so to some extent I think this will be selected for.
Just as the road to increased productivity from CPUs calls for further parallelization, so does the refinement of the human mind.
and maybe it's a case of one or the other --increasing the ability to balance multiple tasks decreases a persons ability to work effectively on a single one.
Something wants your attention, allow or deny?
I finally updated my sig, but now it's lame.
Instant messaging is usually a distraction, but generally I keep my email reading to certain times o f they day, and then sort the messages with things-to-do into folders based on priority.
I'd much rather get things in email, where I can re-read, request more details, verify, and otherwise justify my work rather than an office drive-by work-assignment.
Being bombarded with emails sucks, but CC'ing the boss on well-tuned responses to idiotic requests is usually helpful, and if you're called to task on something dumb that was assigned to you by somebody else, an electronic trail helps too. Mileage may depend on how good your boss is, but a decent boss may just intervene if he notices a lot of CC's to somebody who's wasting your (and thus the company's) time.
... but I see it's just a discussion of a B.S. Bingo buzzword.
This video makes a distinction in different types of multitasking:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5vRMgw6pk4
--Mike--
So this entire time me shunning the idea that people could really multitask was more or less correct. Now when people complain that I can't multitask, or I'm just ignoring their IMs and emails I'll send them this link.
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
But that's beside the point. You're confusing individuals with species again. A tendency towards specialization doesn't mean that all humans will be born engineers, now does it?
"I see no evidence that would show that humans are not multi tasking creatures."
I know it is tempting to judge evolution by the trend of a dozen or even hundred of years, but you must look at human evolution of the course of tens of thousands of years, if not more, to distinguish trends. Nice try reversing my argument like that, but what do you mean? Homo sapiens stayed exactly the same the last couple thousand generations - seems there's little evolutionary pressure left.How many people do you know who have mastered more than one profession? How is it that one-man-orchestras are not the de facto standard for performing music?
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
I know people who play multiple toons and feel they are doing as well as if they were on one toon... and they are not. (However, they are better coordinated with themselves since they know exactly when the other toon is going to do something).
You can drive one car (and change the radio, flip the signals, press the pedal) okay.
You really can't drive two cars that well tho. A lot of modern life seems to be about wanting us to drive two cars at the same time.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Men's brains are more oriented towards focusing on a single task, while women's brains are designed for multitasking. So I'm not so sure that multitasking is really as detrimental for women.
1999 called, they want their joke back.
The analysis is flawed. The predator example, among others, is not an adaptation to multi-tasking, or at least not in an active sense, but rather an adaptation to make objects moving in one's peripheral vision, like the details of walking and balance, part of the autonomic nervous system and sub-conscious control system of our brains. In other words, evolution has pushed certain selected tasks into deeper levels to be more "hard wired" so that we can do those few selected important things (like be aware of those sabertooth tigers lurking in our peripheral vision) without devoting active conscious thinking resources to the problem as we would do with more generic or complex situations which do not occur as often and are not as critical to immediate survival. However, this is not the same thing as a generic multitasking capability where any task that requires use of the brain can be conducted in this fashion.
The managers who continue to promote the multi-tasking paradigm (among other forms of wishful thinking) are the same ones who have little or no knowledge about how multi-tasking actually works, even in non-human settings such as computers. The ability of computers to multi-task is an illusion achieved by frequent and and continuous context-switching between tasks such that each task gets a miniscule slice of time during each cycle through the running tasks. Strictly speaking, the computer is only working on one thing at any given instant (or one per core if you count multi-core chips which support multiple but still finite simultaneous execution threads) whether that is a task or switching between tasks. The human brain is terrible at context switching, especially when compared to computers, and even computers can be easily overwhelmed by too much context switching (i.e. eventually so much work is expended to switch and maintain contexts that the amount of work required merely to switch leaves no time for any actual work to be done on the taks...or in other words, the computer is merely thrashing and not doing very much if any useful work).
Scatterbrains do not bring down game.
Distracted dummies cannot track wounded game for miles and hours, maybe days.
The best hunters in my family are the most serene.
Human beings are meant to multi-task. Staying alert for potential predators while gathering food seems like a top notch trait to carry on. Yes, and the very act of gathering food requires sustained attention to the task.We are talking about two nonexclusive modes of human operation, and the point of being human is that we can choose how to operate in this spectrum. Animals have less, if any, choice.
We can employ our volitional consciousness to develop our mindful awareness.
It is what makes the martial arts so beautiful.
And what makes the martial artist so dadgum hard to sneak up on!
I have mixed reactions to TFA and what it discusses. I am reasonably good at multitasking: I can hold a conversation with someone while typing email at pretty much full speed and do a good job of both if the conversation isn't particularly important. (replying in detail to "Did you get those boards ordered?" is manageable, while replying in any detail at all to "what sort of filtering do we need on the output?" means I'm not going to be doing anything else for the next ten minutes.)
One thing I did notice: a couple years ago I was in a serious car crash and now have a lot of memory problems. I can't recognize faces correctly sometimes, and there are specific classes of words that I have an exceptionally difficult time remembering, for instance. As a result I've had to learn to concentrate much, much more carefully than I used to, and I've lost a lot of my ability to do true multiprocessing: I have to consciously time-slice, and deal with interruptions carefully lest I forget where I was in what I was doing. I seem to be as productive as I used to be, but I think it's mostly because I'm concentrating a lot more intensely. Now, I get more done on fewer things, but overall it's about the same amount of total progress.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
C.S Lewis wrote of men even in his generation that "they are distracted from distraction by distraction".
G.K Chesterton often asked of those who touted doing things in the name of 'progress'. "progress towards what?".
I think we have gotten into a dangerous cycle of technology for technologies sake and all technologist should take some time and truly consider their goals.
How or even does/ technology X improve the human condition and or human life?
what are the trade offs, what are the risks. Like many other issues, in both modern and ancient society, it is all to easy to dismiss deeper and complex issues without any great thought by slapping on a slogan and then going forward.
'we do it in the name of progress'
'we do it in the name of freedom'
'we do it in the name of '
The issue is that as our technical abilities expand , we are either going to have to become a much more introspect, spiritual, and truth based race, or will we become an extinct one.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
I could easily argue about the thousands of specialized creatures that have died out over the course of time. I am not talking about "individuals" but entire species. I never said anything about people "specializing" to being "engineers", I talked about "specializing" as far as focus versus multi tasking. I'm not attempting a juvenile game of "one upsmanship", so don't take it that I am trying to split hairs with words.
Professions have very little to do with "multi-tasking". Multi tasking is the ability to juggle several different tasks simultaneously, as opposed to being only being able to do "one thing at a time". Another example would be a mother who is able to cook for her family and supervise her children at the same time. A mother that could not handle both tasks would greatly increase their child's likely to have an accident and perish. Perhaps women are better predisposed to multi-task for men due to their role in our species.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
It seems to me that there are two different kinds of interruptions and distractions people keep mentioning: one is the kind that makes you interact with another person, like someone coming by to ask you a question. The other is anything non-interactive, like quiet music or other background noise.
Some people like non-interactive background noise and some people don't, but it does seem that NOBODY likes the interactive interruptions--those are what really make people lose their focus, because they break your concentration. But I still think that listening to quiet music doesn't necessarily break concentration--maybe it does for some people, but not everyone's wired the same way.
There are different types of multi-tasking and different kinds of interruptions and distractions, and if you don't recognize that you can't say anything meaningful about them.
Maybe someone has already made this point, but perhaps we can extend the computer analogy inherent in the title of this article and deal with preemptive versus cooperative multitasking.
I believe the article is discussing only preemptive multitasking, in the sense that in the middle of doing one task, you will suddenly have your attention grabbed by some stimulus.
On the other hand, perhaps cooperative multitasking isn't so bad. In this sense, you might get to a logical break in the work and then switch to another task (eg, check your e-mail quickly).
Thank God for evolution.
Funnily enough, though, Leonardo da Vinci seems to aggree with the summary, though. He wrote: "As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself."
I will agree though that it does seem a bit baffling a quote, coming from, you know, Leonardo da Vinci.
On the other hand, even Leonardo da Vinci does sorta illustrate his point. While he did excel in a handful of domains, his interest sprawling into others has produced less than briliant results. He actually wrote that salamanders are born from fire, or such gems as, "The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue."
So maybe he did have a point with that quote about divided minds. If he had devoted more of his efforts to, I don't know, engineering, instead of dabbling into where salamanders come from, I'm sure he would have had a bigger return from that investment. Who knows how many more inventions of pure genius we would have had in that case?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
http://www.matthewkelly.org/quote8.html
"All man's miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone." -- Blaise Pascal
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
I have a 19 year old currently doing BS Computer Science. I just watched her take the whole weekend to complete a project that should have taken at most 2 hours. The reason ? She has her music playing, cell phone at the ready, and no less than 3 distinct messenger clients and 2 email clients open. Any interruption from any of these 7 sources cause her to stop working to either change the track, answer the SMS, answer an IM or reply to an email. I try to explain to her that perhaps if she shut the bloody lot off for 2 hours, and simply CONCENTRATED on what she was doing, she could be done in no time and then have the whole weekend free to "socialize" online. But I'm the one "out of touch" :-(
In fact, read about court gatherings in general. If you couldn't say witty things that were both on topic and full of subtext, while watching the other groups across the room, while planning a liason later with somebody you were signaling to, and listening to the broader conversation, you were considered too much of a loser to be bothered with. Les Precieuses were all f*ckin' fast, and unforgiving of those who couldn't keep up. As were Oscar Wilde's circle and plenty of others. And since they tended to spend a lot of time playing cards while doing all of the above, sometimes for gut-wrenchingly high stakes, you could get seriously fubared to the scale of personal bankruptcy by not being able to track all the variables at once. Same thing in Imperial China, right down to the gambling. Multitasking wasn't just admired, it was a survival skill. And, what a surprise, it was just such a card player who invented the Sandwich. Because, logically, he couldn't spare the attention to eat a conventional sit down meal. Sounds kinda like a techie mid-project, no?
Trust me, folks, you want to read about serious multitasking, read about Cyrano de Bergerac. The guy wrote pretty damn good poetry, quite literally while sword-fighting. And flirting. And watching for the Guard.
Absolutely badass.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Does it mean I need to stop reading Slashdot while at work? hehe
Another example would be a mother who is able to cook for her family and supervise her children at the same time. A mother that could not handle both tasks would greatly increase their child's likely to have an accident and perish.
I understand the idea, but I don't think this is a relevant example. In my (very limited) understanding of early human civilization, you wouldn't have had the mother cooking & watching the children. If anything, mothers would cook and older children would supervise the younger children. This would allow mothers to focus on preparing good meals, and give older children the experience & responsibility for watching over each other.
That's the other fallacy in your example -- you implicitly assume that the mother is doing an equally sufficient job of cooking & supervising, when the evidence (such as referenced by TFA), is that people who multi-task do each task much more poorly. A multi-tasking mother is much more likely to under or overcook food, or miss key ingredients or steps, or not be paying attention at the crucial moment when the child is running around with a stick, etc.
Gee, I hope she's not on the same road with me. I like to have news radio turned on, my iPod plugged into one ear with music, my cell-phone plugged in the other, and a good book in the steering wheel. I usually do OK until my blackberry starts buzzing and I need to write an email.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Everyone knows that task-switch 'thrashing' wastes CPU time. Context switches cost time.
However, it's not a binary decision. If the task switch time is *small* compared to the work done, then it can become a saver. If I find myself 'blocked' on a particular task -- I'm more efficient to switch to something else and continue to make forward progress. I often will find that answers to previous "stick-points" will either just appear or pop out of my mind when I am not directly thinking about it -- I let my 'non-conscious brain "mull over" the problem in background.
Trying to pressure an answer out of my brain when the answer just isn't cooked yet results in lots of wasted time
and cakes that go flat rather than rise.
So the key is finding the task rate appropriate for the tasks at hand and the individual. That will be different for each person -- you can't tell someone ok, if this will take more than 5 minutes, switch -- that may be non-productive -- since different people do task switching at widely differing rates.
But forcing one to stick on a subject until 'solved' is the quickest way to a slow, bad or non-solution.
Too bad some pinhead, Machiavellian, Dilbert manager types are clueless when it comes to how minds work. They think the world works like a 'machine', because they perceive themselves to work that way. Not only do they not know what is best for others, but they don't know themselves either.
AKA meditation? A lot of people tend to dismiss meditation as a sort of a new-agey or spiritual mumbo jumbo that doesn't help anything. I remember talking about it to a boss of mine, and he said his mantra was "Owa tagoo siam." I told him he was clever, but that mantra wasn't good for much more than a chuckle. Try that one, though; repeat it a few times and you'll see the light.
Seriously, though, mindfulness is a way to get in touch with your body and understand how much of what is going on in your mind is noise and chatter, and how much of it is just natural ebb and flow of emotions that we tend to justify as rational reactions to our surroundings. How many times have you had a co-worker come in spoiling for a fight, and found that, no matter what you do, they'll find something to pick apart. The noise of you clicking your pen isn't what they're mad at; they're just mad and you're giving them a justification to aim it at you.
Meditation is like martial arts for the brain. If done right, it allows you to focus more when you need to, and even more importantly, it trains you to understand what is real and what are distractions, so that at any time, you can make a good decision as to what actually needs your focus.
I had a conversation with a friend about this who didn't get it until I put it this way. He'd just recently started dating this amazing woman, and I asked him, how often do you find yourself not getting your work done because you're thinking about last night or your next date with her. His smiling response: a lot! Then I asked him, how often do you find that, when you're with her, you're distracted because you didn't finish what you needed to at work? His response, less smiling: a lot.
We're not machines, and some multitasking is necessary, and some distractions are welcome, unavoidable or both. But there are certainly ways that we can improve our lives by learning what are useful distractions and what are not, and mindfulness is a tool which can help with that.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Because I was diagnosed with it as a kid and it's probably why I became so good at working with computer technology.
In school sure you have to pay attention to one person,but on the computer if you can read 100 websites at a time while chatting with 3 people and watching TV, then ADD is helping you take in far more information than you'd haven taken in if you were to focus on just TV or just one website.
Learn to use your ADD as a strength and stop using it as a crutch.
Did someone mention "focus" from "A Deepness in the Sky"?
Interestingly, My psychiatrist advised me to do quite the opposite. I'm somewhat of an unusual case (which is indeed why I need the psychiatrist). His suggestion was to have multiple stimulation sources at hand so I can readily switch from one to the other rather than drift away into my own imagination.
I actually laughed when he suggested this,I had gone a long way towards that myself simply by trying to satisfy my desire for more information at hand. I have a three monitor system(each running a different OS, one keyboard/mouse via synergy). 109 tabs(maybe 20% wikipedia) in the web browsers and I'm in 13 irc channels.
From my perspective the multitasking certainly isn't detrimental to learning. Work on the other hand...
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake.
He called it waaaaaay back in 2001: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000022.html
Apparently you're not a hunter, or much of an outdoorsman.
Staying alert for potential predators while gathering food seems like a top notch trait to carry on.
But those are not competing, or different, tasks. They are one and the same.
They both require high concentration on one's environment through sensory input - primarily visual and auditory. These tasks are not taken separately, but as a whole. The hunter is being observant of things which impact the whole picture of his hunt or gathering: which predators might be around, and where food might be best acquired. Is he screwing things up by making too much noise? And so on and so forth - just like a programmer intent on his code, considering the various items within the formulas which impact the larger picture.
A better analogy would be taking one's woman on a hunt or gathering activity. That would be the "two things at once" analogy, as her body would be a distraction, as would any talking she performs.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Is "multitasking" only about simultaneously trying to solve multiple unrelated problems or does it apply to maintaining concurrent and synergistic streams of thought towards the same overall goal but addressing different aspects of that problem?
And what is our time unit for determining how many problems are being addressed? A day? An hour? A second? If we're talking about anything longer than two or three seconds then most of the men above (I would have included women if any had come to mind) would certainly qualify as habitual multitaskers. Sticking to the two who hung out together, read about Franklin and Jefferson and their behavior in the meetings of, say, the Continental Congress. Or about Franklin's playing five or six factions off each other at a party in Paris while playing a musical instrument, flirting, and gaming how he was perceived by the opinionmakers in general. These words; I truly don't know, do they mean what you think they mean?
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Bed - i.e. in bed, when first getting up, and when getting ready to go to sleep. Lots of good results while brushing teeth.
Bath - i.e. bathing, especially in a long shower or bath.
Bus - i.e. transit time. I'm under the impression that time on mass transit got better results than time driving. Biking and walking were also both excellent.
Personally, I consider this enough reason to show up MP3 players for the bane of humanity that they are. If you fill your best time for problem solving with maximally distracting stimuli, you will become, well, stupider. The human mind improves with use. Literally. The state of your axons is changed by how and how much you use them. The person who commutes on the bus, quietly thinking about their day will, over the years, quite literally get a faster, more powerful brain than the person who is blasting stuff on their iPod all day long.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
I don't want to go too far into the etiologies and mechanisms of "genius", but, fwiw, these are subjects I've devoted a lot of time to studying and thinking about and I've come to the conclusion, to expand on what I wrote above, that many of them have what one can call Michael Jackson disease. As I said above, when they're young, they have insights that they know are valid and everybody or almost everybody tell them that they're wrong. Chances are, the more fundamentally insightful, and therefore the more important, the more these insights are likely to make the people around them uncomfortable. This creates a perverse proportionality. The more important the insight is, the more the young thinker is insulted, derided, trivialized, and told that they're something between an idiot, a fool, and a troublemaker.
So, put yourself in their shoes. You have to choose. To what do degree do you surrender your convictions about your mind's products and to what degree do you shut yourself off from, delegitimize the conclusions of others about your work? For all of us this is a spectrum and, again, perversely, for those who are doing the most innovative work who intend to keep doing such work, this habit of ignoring or even holding in contempt the conclusions will likely become strongest.
So what happens if the thinker is, like Howard Hughes or Jackson, isolated from intellectually equal peers and friends? The phenomenon accelerates. And what happens when the results of the thinker's mind start bringing the validation of money, fame, etc? This isolation get even more extreme as the thinker sees their conclusions, the legitimacy of their way of seeing things proven and, if they've already got lack of experience of being part of a community of other brilliant peers, they're going to end up surrounded by yesmen and other slavish idiots.
And it's all downhill from there.
The lesson: Put smart kids with other smart kids. Don't treat them like freaks. It's healthy for them to compete and crucial for them to have some degree of friendship with worthy competitors. Help them validate their talents early and simultaneously give them a skill for, a hunger for, and a respect for reality checks from others.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.