More Evidence That Multitasking Reduces Productivity

bdking writes "A recent study by a Louisiana State University psychology professor adds more evidence to the argument that the human brain is incapable of performing numerous tasks without memory and productivity loss. 'In four separate experiments, both local second-graders and LSU psychology students were shown words on a computer screen and instructed to remember them in the correct sequence. As the participants read the words, they also sometimes heard unrelated words in the headphones all were wearing. Adults in the LSU study showed a word recall performance drop of 10% on average, while the second-graders’ performance diminished by up to 30% on average.'"

Comments

High cost of open plan

[vlm]

Look at the high cost of loud open plan cube farms... imagine being able to lower your salary costs by 10% to 30% by productivity increases, merely by providing a more humane working environment.

Isn't it odd that you never hear people complaining, "I'm trying to concentrate here, so make a bunch of noise, OK?"

Re:Here's the thing.

[obarel]

Here's the thing: would you like to do things once and finish them, or keep fixing the mistakes you've made while being distracted?

Coooperative or Preemptive Multitasking?

[zhiwenchong]

I find I'm very productive when I focus on short tasks and switch between them (sort of like how co-routines work).

I'm not productive when I'm doing more than one thing at a time.

I hope the experiment doesn't match the summary

[fibonacci8]

For what task(s) were the accompanying unrelated words used? If there weren't additional tasks used to measure the retention of the unrelated words, this doesn't test multitasking at all. Not to mention the 10%/30% drops do not represent a loss in productivity if the additional simultaneous tasks result in a net improvement. The summary sounds like a first grader put together the experiment, time to read the article...

Mod parent up.

[khasim]

The trick to "multi-tasking" is to break the various tasks down into sub-tasks that can be completed in the time between interruptions.

The human brain is NOT good at focusing on two or more conscious tasks.

Re:Here's the thing.

[rgbatduke]

Except that is not what they tested, is it? They tested people on whether or not they could work efficiently if they are distracted, not whether or not multitasking improves or doesn't improve efficiency.

The silly thing is that we actually know quite a lot about task organization for efficient multitasking. It is a key component of task scheduling on any computer. Fine grained multitasking -- especially on a CPU that has a large latency component for switching tasks, is known as "thrashing", and is also known to degrade performance substantially, and whacking a computer with a steady stream of pointless interrupts so that it is always thrashing slows it down.

At the same time, executing tasks with the right granularity and with the right kinds of latency and parallelism can speed things up quite a lot compared to doing tasks one at a time. This, too, is true in life as much as it is in computers. Anybody who cooks knows that you cannot generally make a good meal in serial fashion. If you want to serve rice with a stir fry and end up with dessert in a timely manner, you have to be cooking the rice, chilling the dessert, and chopping up and frying the main course all "at the same time", with layered overlaps in the attention you pay to the different tasks. The tasks are all related and a skilled cook can juggle quite a few of them without cognitive or operational overload and finish a meal far faster than anyone would ever finish it cooking one thing at a time (to a soggy, cold, unproductive finish).

Most normal humans multitask all the time. I listen to music and work while wiggling my feet to maintain circulation. I hop from answering email to posting silly things like this reply to doing work on task A to doing work on task B to doing work on task C -- so much the more so when my tasks are all different, all use the computer (or a number of computers) and take different amounts of time (attended or unattended) to move on to the next stage of completion. Yes, I can be overloaded, I can thrash in my normal work if overloaded so little gets done, but that is entirely different from asking if I can work when somebody is randomly blasting uncorrelated and meaningless distractions into my workspace.

rgb