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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.'"
I propose that a new word is added to the English dictionary: distraction.
I was reading about this in a couple of other tabs when... dang... lost my train of thought...
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?"
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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?
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.
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...
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It seems to me that they're comparing two different attention tasks. In multi-tasking, you would be concerned with how the brain juggles two or more things you're [i]trying[/i] to focus on, while this one is talking about how you deal with meaningless distraction. Related, maybe, but how is it multi-tasking?
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Let's try this. You have four tasks. Each task has some dead time involved as you're waiting for something to happen. Subject 1 does each task sequentially. Subject 2 interleaves the tasks, doing work on the next task during the dead time in the previous task. Who finishes first?
Multitasking reduces the time you are waiting for a task to complete, and in many environments, despite the acknowledged penalty due to context switching, you'll come out ahead.
It seems like all they proved is that distraction is not good. (Well done, Captain Obvious.) That's not testing effectiveness of multitasking.
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If you can listen to music and code at the same time, then you tend to do better in an open plan cube farm, but due to continuous partial attention, perhaps not so well as if you had some place quiet to cogitate.
If you can't listen to music because that's the part of your brain that also processes code, you tend to be at a disadvantage because there's no refuge in wearing headphones. I do OK in an open plan environment, but I do better in an office, since when I get into a deep problem, I tend to react to expected distraction. On the plus side, I can generally go fairly deeper than someone who is listening to music, or at least that's my personal anecdotal experience.
Generally speaking, in open plan cube farm companies, you can typically find a small conference room, or you can find a quiet corner of a lab, or you can grab a phone room, or you can work from home (which they tend to tolerate better than office-based companies) in these situations, so it's not impossible to make progress on deep problems.
Many ladies claim that men can only do one thing at a time...
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.
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Hence the expression "it's not rocket surgery".
Multitasking is doing two tasks at once. This is just distracting the kids. When people multitask, they generally get to choose when they do each task. In this experiment they just randomly hear unrelated words. This experiment has nothing to do with multitasking.
I'm not going to argue that multitasking is beneficial, but the real story is the abysmal quality of this research.
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Because he/she is a lefty and he/she would like to think they were better at something then the righties. Typical leftist thinking :-D
Without having read the article, it seems like this study might have a flaw. The brief description seems to imply an overlap in the two tasks: memorizing read words and hearing unrelated words. I'm not sure most types of multitasking are like this. I can context switch as long as there's enough switched. Besides, isn't real multitasking the ability to make progress on one task and then ignore it for a bit while making progress on another task? I hardly ever attempt to do *simultaneous tasks*.
This thread calls for: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I
Alas, that's not your choices. You can either do one thing well followed by another in X time or you can do both at once poorly in 1.1X time (and then do them again later because they needed to be done well).
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.
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Wow, this is so far off the mark that I'm amazed you got upvoted at all. It's especially clear that you have no background in psychology, and your computer metaphor is particularly gross and is typical of when a computer scientist makes fanciful speculations on the nature of human cognition...
First of all, the claim was not that it is impossible to "multitask" in the ways you mention. Let me preface by saying this gets a little more complex with well-rehearsed tasks that have acquired some level of automaticity to them.
Furthermore,
When it comes to humans, this is essentially the same thing, as attentional focus switches between tasks. Even though the brain is massively parallel, much of human cognition, functionally speaking, works serially. I'm sure you've noticed that the more you attend to the road while driving the less you can follow the music that is playing, and vice versa. Although the nature of attention or what is even the best way to define "attention" is somewhat up in the air, quite generally the more you switch between tasks and the more attentional resources are required, the more you will suffer in performance of all the tasks. It's cute that some of the comments here on slashdot basically amount to, "well, these guys are wrong, just look at what you do in the kitchen!" as if that addresses anything the psychologists are saying. Do you really think psychologists are claiming you can't fart and chew bubble gum at the same time? Hell, let's use that cooking example--how much do you want to bet that the busier a restaurant is (keep the number of employees constant), the rate of errors increases drastically? Yeah, exactly.
Most interesting of all is why slashdot is posting this story, since this sort of thing pretty established in psychological science and many experimental methodologies and techniques regarding attention do just this sort of thing, although maybe not across the same sensory modalities.
How much you wanna bet the bartender makes more errors the busier it gets and the more stimuli he has to attend to?
It's not the sa,e thing at all. They showed that doing a task while also being distracted by a NON-task reduced the effectiveness of the one and only task. That's not multi-tasking. A better test would have been to ask the subjects to remember what was shown and what was heard, to actually multi-task. Then count as the score any word remembered - whether the word was shown or heard. They failed by crediting only the performance on task #1. To use a real world multi-tasking example, suppose you are sorting email as pages load for a report you are researching. The syudu counts how many emails you sort. Sue, you'll sort fewer emails if you're multi-tasking, but you'll also complete the report at the same time! Ignoring the fact that TWO tasks were competed rather than just one makes the study worthless.
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Consistent observation from my experience: There is always time to fix something when things go wrong, but never enough time to do things properly from the beginning.
What is multi-tasking. Doing several tasks, each individual task segmented into short activities, combined together to a larger activity for several hours OR trying to pat your head and rub your stomach while performing open heart surgery, piloting a jet in combat and making love... okay, this is slashdot... jerking off.
Women often claim they multi-task better then men but this is usually the first type. Putting the laundry in, making a shopping list, dropping the kids off, go to work, run an errand, make a call, do the shopping, put laundry in dryer, prepare the long cooking part of dinner, pick kids up, listen to their stories, finish cooking etc etc.
This is multi-tasking, computer style. A computer (single CPU at least) does NOT do multipletasks... AT THE SAME TIME. Rather it switches between them and being a computer, it does this really fast. For humans, the switching can only be done so fast but sometimes it is necessary.
But it has been shown beyond a doubt that doing two tasks at the same time is something we are very bad at. All humans. Driving and doing ANYTHING else at the same time, massively increases the chance of an accident. Yes you to, wonder driver.
This test was not about doing several tasks that people had to switch between, but doing several things at once.
Useful multi-tasking still allows you to concentrate on each individual task fully OR trade-off accuracy (listening to kids while doing housework, watching TV while going, "your right" to the wive... okay... your mom. But as any husband knows, this is highly dangerous because you might miss something essential. And then their is hell to pay.
I can read a document and talk on the phone at the same time but I also find I make far more reading mistakes, missing entire lines or reading a word completely wrong causing me to mis-interpret the text.
MindlessAutomata (on-topic nick if ever there was one) makes however one mistake. The human brain isn't massively parallel, our entire body is. You! do not exist. Rather there is a collection of individual cells, tiny lifeforms many of which don't have any of "your" DNA (bacteria) which have formed a "colony" not unlike a coral where multiple animals work together to survive and reproduce. Your gut for instance can be severed from your brain and continue to function. Few other parts can do that as paraplegics demonstrate by being unable to move below the waste but still have their gut work just fine.
You don't even have think about most massive processing your brain does. You can "think" about what you are seeing without even knowing or controlling HOW you see. How all that light is processed into a picture. We don't even think about, for the longest time we didn't even understand. Or language. How come you understand these strange symbols?
But this again, is not multi-tasking. It is closer to a computer having seperate processors for discrete tasks.
Truly doing several things at once, is hard.
Just pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time. And no, it doesn't count if you learned yourself how to do that. Then you are just doing ONE thing that just involves two hands. That is easy, any mechanic can do that. The trick about the patting and rubbing is doing two things you normally never do together, at once. And then your massive brain has serious problems.
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