The Problem with Multitasking

I do not recall when multitasking became fashionable. I do recall writing several posts years ago arguing that multitasking is bad for your brain health. It makes you more dysfunctional and inept. It might even lower your IQ.

If you want to succeed in business or in school or in any other relevant task, you should focus on the task at hand and you should tune out, even erase, anything that might distract you. 

One might even suggest, in regard to yesterday’s post, that working at home provides far more distraction than working in an office. People thrill to the chance of working at home because it allows them to involve themselves in multiple tasks at the same time. In truth, this causes them to lose focus and to become more inefficient.

The same rule applies to anyone who spends gobs of time on social media, or who bounces back and forth between social media and more pertinent tasks. Social media distracts and makes us less efficient and less effective. It applies equally well to people who are constantly checking their email and text messages or who work with the television buzzing in the background. One suspects, as one normally would, that people who share an office do not feel distracted because their office mates or cubicle mates are similarly involved in work-related activities. Obviously, if your office mate is spending half the day on Tinder, this might prove to be distracting.

Julie Jargon reported the latest research a few months ago in the Wall Street Journal. Strangely, from my perspective, she writes as this counts as news. As I said, I was reporting on research some five years ago.

Be that as it may, Jargon opens thusly:

As it turns out, media multitasking is making us less productive, not more, according to neuroscientists and others who are studying this. You might be checking stuff off your to-do list, but you might also be missing some of the more important things that go whizzing by.

Failing to focus on a single task causes us to become confused and to make mistakes:

Nonstop toggling between devices and apps slows our ability to process and retain information, decreases our ability to filter out extraneous information, shortens our attention span and causes us to make mistakes, neuroscientists say. The researchers say the glut of new technological distractions over the past decade means the consequences of bad multitasking are now more dire.

Neuroscience has demonstrated the point. And it shows how the studies were conducted. For that we turn first to Finland:

Attempting to do too many things at once causes a bottleneck in the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s control center, according to brain researchers at the University of Helsinki. They conducted brain-imaging scans of young adults to see what was going on while the participants were asked to read or listen to two kinds of sentences: sensical (“This morning I ate a bowl of cereal.”) and nonsensical (“This morning I ate a bowl of shoes.”).

The result was:

The participants’ ability to correctly identify sentences declined significantly when their attention was divided between the written and spoken sentences.

Psychiatrist Carl Marci studied the issues at Mass General Hospital:

Dr. Marci first began studying media multitasking when he worked at market-research firm Nielsen as chief neuroscientist of its consumer-neuroscience division. In 2002, he saw American adults were spending up to 40 hours a week consuming media; now, they’re spending about 80 hours a week doing so.

“How do people spend the equivalent of two full-time jobs a week consuming media? It isn’t possible unless they’re doing two things at once,” said Dr. Marci, who dedicated a section of his new book, “Rewired: Protecting Your Brain in the Digital Age,” to the phenomenon.

Those at greatest risk are children, he said, who are spending more time on devices at ever-younger ages, which has the potential for disaster come the teenage years.

Dr. Marci is not alone in remarking that children are most at risk from social media and even television. The studies show that children learn less when they do homework with the television is on. Surely, they learn less when they allow themselves to be distracted by video games. There is a reason why libraries are such a good place to study and why silence is the rule in all of them:

Numerous studies have found that learning suffers among young children even when TV is on in the background, and that grades decline when students are texting or using social media in class or when doing homework.

As for adults, the same rule applies:

Adults aren’t immune to the detrimental effects of trying to do too much. We’re constantly distracted by notifications at work and families can’t seem to watch a TV show together without one or more members simultaneously scrolling social media.

Obviously, it is possible to work at home and not be distracted by the ambient noise or even by the cares and concerns of other family members. And yet, when you have a spouse at home or small children running around, you will need a very dedicated office space to shield yourself against distraction and to do your best job.

Otherwise, you will end up in a condition described well by T. S. Eliot:

Distracted from distraction by distraction.