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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]
Apparently it affects memory as well. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/27/2221228&from=rss
...it's been found that most guys already have a great tool for all this mono-tasking, Selective Hearing.
In other words, I should wipe my drive and install MS DOS.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
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.
My life is so dull, I donate unused excess brain power to SETI and Folding@home
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
It can be applied to most of us, companies should be aware of that. Cubicles and open offices are default nowadays, so people can constantly drop by and ask things. Instant messaging and e-mail only make it worse.
When I'm at work programming, I want to do just that. When my manager asks me about the state of things, I lose my concentration, have to write down some notes about what I was working on, answer his question, read my notes and try to regain my concentration. Sometimes it takes fifteen minutes or more to regain my concentration, most of the time I completely lose important work because I lost the idea or can't make sense of the halfway finished code I just wrote. A simple question (from his perspective) costs fifteen minutes or more of my time and could lead to ugly unmaintainable code.
When companies just start to realise that most people can't multitask and change their corporate culture accordingly, overall productivity will increase.
"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.
Good call. I score some bullshit number on IQ tests (185, once, in a real one). I am smarter than the average bear, for sure, but... that bright and glinty ability to whizz through IQ tests is only vaguely related to my analytical success which is down to grim concentration and long, hard, thought. Quite why the shithead management persist in putting us in pods of cubicles so that I get the 'benefit' of background chatter is beyond me. Fortunately my sound cancelling headphones deal with that, albeit at the expense of giving me something more interesting than spreadsheets to entertain myself with.
Clue for fuckwit managers- if your staff are interested in music and are truly listening to the Brandenburg concertoes, then they are not paying much attention to the screen in front of them. Bach is a mind sucking alien.
Well said.
I have never understood the people who claim to multi-task, because I've often observed that when they do multi-task, do so rather poorly, and perform poorly at all the tasks that they have to do. Why would you simply not take the time to focus on each one, and get it out of the way?
If I'm doing something, my girlfriend often tries to interrupt me, but for the most part, I just tune everything else out and do the one thing that I want. She finds it hard to understand, but it's just the way I've been raised (and wired). Growing up, distractions were a strict no-no, and I'm quite thankful for that. If I'm at work, I turn IMs and emails off (the Blackberry remains turned on, though, just in case).
The end result is that I find that it takes me a lot less time to do something than the people who claim that they can only multi-task. I have friends who are so much more better and so much more focussed at doing things, and the one thing that I can tell you is that they are all a lot more efficient at getting things done than me.
Likewise, my ADD friends claim to be able to multi-task, but do a VERY poor job of actually doing it. Sure, you do ten things at the same time, but I could have done 20 things better, faster and more efficiently by focusing separately than you did ten without any focus or singular goal.
Just my two cents.
The whole post is a joke. I have ADD, and I'm terrible at multi-tasking. I used to think I was good at it and to the casual observer, I probably appear to be good at it. But I have realized that the less I multitask, the more I actually get done. I came to this realization when I noticed that I couldn't remember a damn thing I read when there is any fair amount of background noise.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
The joke here seems to be that the stated behavior is the opposite of multitasking. However, breathing is an autonomous function - while you can consciously interfere with it to a certain degree, it just happens - and it requires very little intervention from the brain. Breathing and the beating heart are more like examples of coprocessors :P
Christ, here's a whole area of analogy virtually untapped on Slashdot - horribly mistaken medical analogies. This one should be even more exciting than the car thing, because even LESS people know anything about how the body works than know how their car works (hint: most people here who think they know what's going on under the hood are sadly. fucking. mistaken. as proven by the floods of bad automotive analogies.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So what you're saying is that a slashdot thread without an analogy is like a car with only one liver?