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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.
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?"
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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...
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
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.
Hence the expression "it's not rocket surgery".
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
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
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
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.