Multi-tasking: how to survive in the 21st century Tim Harford
Modern life now forces us to do a multitude of things at once — but can we? Should we?
Multi-tasking has become a fact of modern day life, very nearly a requirement. There are those who refute the benefits of multi-tasking however, and others who claim there are dangers in attempting to balance several tasks at once. A backlash against multi-tasking has begun to form, and the argument for which side is right is being studied by psychologists and other scientists. In several different studies, the benefits and detriments of attempting to perform multiple tasks at the same time is researched. This article offers the potential pros and cons to multi-tasking and explores the different studies conducted on the subject, from the cognitive costs and benefits of multi-tasking to its history. This article also clarifies the various types of activities that are classified under the overarching umbrella of multi-tasking, and what effects these different activities have on the human mind. The author, Tim Harford, is an English columnist and journalist for the Financial Times, as well as author of four economics books. He lives in London and writes his long-running, Slate magazine-syndicated column, ‘The Undercover Economist,’ as well as a new column ‘Since you asked,’ a skeptic’s look at the news for the week.
Forget invisibility or flight; the superpower we all want is the ability to multitask. Unlike other superpowers, however, being able to do several things at once is now widely regarded as a basic requirement for employability. Some of us sport computers with multiple screens, to allow tweeting while trading pork bellies and frozen orange juice. Others read a Kindle while poking at a smartphone and glancing at a television scrolling subtitles. We think nothing of sending an email to a colleague to suggest a quick coffee break, because we feel confident the email will be read within minutes. All this is simply the way the modern world works. Multitasking is like being able to read, so fundamental that it is taken for granted. The rise of multitasking is fueled by technology, of course, and by social change. Husbands and wives no longer specialize as breadwinners and homemakers; each must now do both. Work and play blur. Your friends can reach you on your work email account at 10:00 am, while your boss can reach you on your mobile phone at 10:00 pm. You can shop sitting at your desk and handle a work query in the queue at the supermarket. This is good news in many ways — how wonderful to be able to get things done in what would once have been wasted time! And yet, we are starting to realize that the blessings of a
multitasking life are mixed. We feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of things we might plausibly be doing at any one time, and by the feeling that we are on call at any moment. We fret about our children doing everything at once, flipping through homework while chatting on WhatsApp, listening to music and watching Game of Thrones. Can they really handle all these inputs at once? They seem to think so, despite various studies suggesting otherwise. And so a backlash against multitasking has begun. The poster child for uni-tasking was launched on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter in December 2014. For $499 “The Hemingwrite” computer (Fig.1) promised a nice keyboard, a small e-ink screen and an automatic cloud backup. You couldn’t email on the Hemingwrite. You couldn’t fool around on YouTube. All you could do was type. The Hemingwrite campaign raised over a third of a million dollars. The Hemingwrite (now rebranded the Freewrite) represents an increasingly popular response to the Fig. 1: The Hemingwrite – A beacon of uni-tasking multitasking problem: abstinence. Programs such as Freedom and Self-Control are now available to disable your browser for a preset period of time. The Villa Stéphanie, a hotel in Baden-Baden, offers what has been branded the “ultimate luxury”: a small silver switch beside the hotel bed that will activate a wireless blocker and keep the internet and all its temptations away. The battle lines have been drawn. On one side: the culture of the modern workplace, demanding we should be open to interruption at any time. On the other, the uni-taskers who insist that multitaskers are deluding themselves, and that focus is essential. Who is right?
The ‘cognitive cost’ There is ample evidence in favor of the proposition that we should focus on one thing at a time. Consider a study led by David Strayer, a psychologist at the University of Utah. In 2006, Strayer and his colleagues used a driving simulator to compare the performance of drivers who were chatting on a mobile phone to drivers who had drunk enough alcohol to be at the legal bloodalcohol limit in the US. Chatting drivers didn’t adopt the aggressive, risk-taking style of drunk drivers but were unsafe in other ways. They took much longer to respond to events outside the car, and failed to notice many visual cues around them. Strayer’s infamous conclusion: driving while using a mobile phone is as dangerous as driving while drunk. Less famous was Strayer’s finding that it made no difference whether the driver was using a handheld or hands-free phone. The problem with talking while driving is not a shortage of hands. It is a shortage of mental bandwidth.
We may not immediately realize how multitasking is hampering us. The first time I took to Twitter to comment on a public event was during a televised prime-ministerial debate in 2010. I felt fully engaged with everything that was happening. Yet at the end of the debate I realized, to my surprise, that I couldn’t remember anything that Brown, Cameron and Clegg had said. A study conducted at UCLA in 2006 suggests that my experience is not unusual. Three psychologists, Karin Foerde, Barbara Knowlton and Russell Poldrack, recruited students to look at a series of flashcards with symbols on them, and then to make predictions based on patterns they had recognized. Some predictions were done in a multitasking environment, where the students also had to listen to low- and high-pitched tones and count the high-pitched ones. The students were equally competent at spotting patterns with or without the note-counting task, but when the researchers asked more abstract questions about the patterns, the students struggled to answer questions about the predictions they’d made in the multitasking environment. They had successfully juggled both tasks in the moment — but hadn’t learnt anything they could apply in a different context. That’s an unnerving discovery. When we are sending email during a tedious meeting, we may feel that we’re taking in what is being said. A student may be confident that neither Snapchat nor live football is preventing them taking in their revision notes. But the UCLA findings suggest that this feeling of understanding may be an illusion. So, multitasking can make us forgetful — another way in which multitaskers are a little bit like drunks.
Early multitaskers Given the modern world makes multitasking almost inescapable, all this is unnerving. But perhaps we shouldn’t worry too much. Long before multitasking became ubiquitous, it had a long and distinguished history. In 1958, a young psychologist named Bernice Eiduson embarked on a long-term research project — so long-term that Eiduson died before it was completed. Eiduson studied the working methods of 40 male scientists. She interviewed them periodically over two decades and put them through various psychological tests. Some of these scientists found their careers fizzling out. Four won Nobel Prizes. Several more were invited to join the National Academy of Sciences. After Eiduson died, her colleagues, Robert Root-Bernstein, Maurine Bernstein and Helen Garnier, published an analysis of her work. They wanted to understand what determined whether a scientist would have a long productive career, a combination of genius and longevity. There was no clue in the interviews or psychological tests. But looking at these scientists’ first 100 published research papers, revealed a pattern: the top scientists were constantly changing the focus of their research. The most productive scientists covered five different research areas and moved from one topic to another an average of 43 times. They would publish, and change the subject, publish again, and change the subject again. Since most scientific research takes an extended period of time, the
subjects must have overlapped. The secret to a long and highly productive scientific career? It’s multitasking. Charles Darwin thrived on spinning multiple plates. He began his first notebook on “transmutation of species” two decades before The Origin of Species was published. His A Biographical Sketch of an Infant was based on notes made after his son William was born; William was 37 when he published. Darwin spent nearly 20 years working on climbing and insectivorous plants. And Darwin published a learned book on earthworms in 1881, just before his death. He had been working on it for 44 years. When two psychologists, Howard Gruber and Sara Davis, studied Darwin and other celebrated artists and scientists they concluded that such overlapping interests were common.
Just internet addiction? If the word “multitasking” can apply to both Darwin and a teenager with a serious Instagram habit, there is probably some benefit in defining our terms. There are at least four different things we might mean when we talk about multitasking. One is genuine multitasking: patting your head while rubbing your stomach, or playing the piano and singing. Genuine multitasking is possible, but at least one of the tasks needs to be so practiced as to be done without thinking. Then there’s the challenge of creating a presentation for your boss while also fielding their phone calls and keeping an eye on email in case they want you. This isn’t multitasking in the same sense. A better term is task switching. Our attention flits between the presentation, telephone and inbox. A great deal of what we call multitasking is actually rapid task switching. Task switching is often confused with a third, quite different activity — the guilty pleasure of celebrity gossip and social media updates. There is a difference between reading half a page of a journal article, stopping to write some notes about a possible future project, then returning to the article — and reading half a page of a journal article before clicking on bikini pictures for the rest of the morning. “What we’re often calling multitasking is in fact internet addiction,” says psychologist Shelley Carson. “It’s a compulsive act, not an act of multitasking.” A final kind of multitasking is simply the condition of having a lot of things to do. The car needs to be serviced. Your tooth is hurting. The nanny can’t pick up the kids today. There’s a big meeting to prepare for tomorrow, and your tax return is due next week. Having a lot of things to do is not the same as doing them all at once. It’s just life. And it is not necessarily a stumbling block to getting things done — as Bernice Eiduson discovered.
The fight for focus These four practices all fit under the label “multitasking”. This is not just because of a simple linguistic confusion; they are linked in different ways. In particular, the highly productive practice of having multiple projects invites the less-than-productive habit of rapid task switching. A young experimental psychologist at Berlin University, Bluma Zeigarnik, demonstrated that people have a better recollection of uncompleted tasks. This is called the “Zeigarnik effect”:
when we leave things unfinished, our subconscious keeps reminding us that the task needs attention. The Zeigarnik effect may explain the connection between facing multiple responsibilities and indulging in rapid task switching. We flit from task to task to task because we can’t forget about all of the things that we haven’t yet finished. Of course, there is much to be said for “focus”. But there is much to be said for copperplate handwriting, too, and for having a butler. The world has moved on. There’s something appealing about the Hemingwrite and the hotel room that will make the internet go away, but also something futile. It is probably not true that Facebook is all that stands between you and literary greatness. And in most office environments, the Hemingwrite will not earn you a promotion. Focus can only survive if it can reach an accommodation with the demands of a multitasking world.
A creative edge? The word “multitasking” wasn’t applied to humans until the 1990s, but it has been used to describe computers for half a century. Computers create the illusion of multitasking by switching tasks rapidly, but they perform the switching more quickly, and don’t take 20 minutes to get back on track after an interruption. Nor does a computer fret about what is not being done; it never needs worry about the Zeigarnik effect. It is probably a wise idea to leave rapid task switching to the computers. Yet even flipping between Facebook, email and a document can have some benefits alongside the costs. The psychologist Shelley Carson (Fig.2) and her student Justin Moore recently recruited experimental subjects for a test of rapid task switching. Each subject was given a pair of tasks to do: crack a set of anagrams and read an article from an academic journal. These tasks were presented on a computer screen, and for half of the subjects they were presented sequentially — first solve the anagrams, then read the article. For the other half of the experimental group, the computer switched every two-and-a-half minutes between the anagrams and the journal article, forcing the subjects to change mental gears many times. Unsurprisingly, task switching slowed the subjects down and scrambled their thinking. They solved fewer anagrams and performed poorly on a test of reading comprehension when forced to refocus every 150 seconds.
Fig.2: Dr. Shelley Carson – One of many psychologists interested in understanding the brain’s response to multi-tasking.
But the multitasking treatment did have a benefit. Subjects who had been task switching became more creative. To be specific, their scores on tests of “divergent” thinking improved. Such tests ask subjects to pour out multiple answers to odd questions. They might be asked to think of as many uses as possible for a rolling pin. Involuntary multitaskers produced a greater volume and variety of more original answers. “It seems that switching back and forth between tasks primed people for creativity,” says Carson, an adjunct professor at Harvard. Carson and colleagues have found an association between significant creative achievement and a trait psychologists term “low latent inhibition”. Latent inhibition is the subconscious filter that lets us walk through the world without being overwhelmed by all the different stimuli it hurls at us. And yet people whose filters are a little bit porous have a big creative edge. “You’re letting more information into your cognitive workspace, and that information can be consciously or unconsciously combined,” says Carson. It’s surprising to discover that being forced to switch tasks can make us more creative. It may be still more surprising to realize that in an age where we live under the threat of constant distraction, people who are particularly prone to being distracted are flourishing creatively. Perhaps we shouldn’t be entirely surprised. It’s easier to think outside the box if the box is full of holes. And it’s also easier to think outside the box if you spend a lot of time clambering between different boxes. Perhaps, then, multitasking is not a question of benefit or detriment, but of the situation. If that is the case, then maybe knowing when to multitask is the real superpower. Tim Harford is an FT columnist. His latest book is ‘The Undercover Economist Strikes Back’. Twitter: @TimHarford
Your Turn 1. Think about your daily life. How has your life been affected by the modern-day requirements of multi-tasking? What sorts of activities are you asked to perform simultaneously? 2. What do you think of uni-task solutions like the Hemingwrite? 3. The UCLA study talked about multi-tasking and memory. What is the significance of the correlation they discovered, in your own words? 4. Which of the four different multi-tasking practices mentioned in the article would have the greatest benefit? 5. What is the most significant potential benefit found Dr. Carson’s study, and how could it be best applied to multi-tasking in a productive way?