Multitasking, Not

I cannot say that this is news. I reported on it years ago. The issue is multitasking. Apparently, someone got the zany idea that people could perform several tasks at the same time, and do all of them efficiently.

Wall Street Journal columnist Rachel Feintzeig reports on one’s woman’s effort to master the art of multitasking:

Alison Cate was walking on the treadmill while tapping away on her laptop and taking a selfie. Until she wasn’t. 

Her foot slipped. Her ankle rolled. The desk attachment clipped to the treadmill wobbled as she tried to steady herself. 

“I need to do this, I need to do that. And so let me do it all at once,” Ms. Cate, a 39-year-old marketing manager in Des Moines, Iowa, says of her mind-set much of the time. “There’s gonna come a day when you crash.”

You do not do your best work when you are trying to do three things at the same time. You cannot do your best work when you lose focus. When it comes to work, one task at a time should be your mantra. In fact, neuroscientists have discovered that the human brain cannot work effectively on several tasks at once.

If you needed to hear it from a scientist, here it is:

“You can’t multitask,” says Earl K. Miller, a neuroscience professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. Our brains are wired to do just one cognitively demanding thing at a time, he says. We tell ourselves we’re multitasking, when what we’re actually doing is task-switching, rapidly shifting from one thing to the next. 

As we toggle, our minds stumble as we try to recall where we were and what we were doing, he says. Juggling tasks makes us less creative and more prone to errors; the quality of our work suffers.

So, it’s about finding a singular focus. It’s about working on one thing at a time. It’s about avoiding distraction. It’s about avoiding interruptions.

We need to get back to monotasking—doing one thing at a time. The first step is weaning ourselves from distraction, says David Strayer, a University of Utah professor who has done pioneering research on how brains handle tasks. Not only do our phones and notifications disturb us, we’ve grown to crave their interruptions, too.

If you need some advice you can use, the scientists have it. It is acceptable to take breaks, but do not multitask on your breaks. I am sure that you are relieved already. Their solution: take an occasional walk in the woods. But they do not want you to be talking on your phone while you are perambulating:

Walking, especially in nature, can help revitalize us, too, he says, as long as you are just walking. In one study, Dr. Strayer and colleagues compared two groups of people strolling an arboretum. One group chatted on their phones. The others had their devices taken away.

After the walk, the people who didn’t carry their phones were in a much more calm and rested state than the chatters, researchers found.

So, there you have it. Forget about multitasking. Go back to monotasking. It will improve your work. You might even ask yourself whether you are more likely to multitask when working from home or when working in the office. Hmmm.

Do take a moment to subscribe to my Substack, for a modest fee or for free.