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TwistedArrow.pngFor the last 100 years, every productivity study in every industry has come to the same conclusion: after about 40 hours in a week, the quality of your work starts to degrade. You make mistakes. That’s why working 60 hours may not save you time or money: you’ll spend too much of that time fixing the mistakes you shouldn’t have made in the meantime. That’s why software companies that limit work to 35 hours a week need to employ fewer QA engineers: there isn’t as much mess to clean up.

In a knowledge economy, where thinking and creativity are the raw materials from which products and profit flow, brains are assets. They need to be cherished, nurtured and protected, not abused. Leaders need to take seriously a century’s evidence that 1) overwork doesn’t make us productive, it makes us stupid, 2) looking away from a problem is often the best way to solve it, and 3) burnout is what happens when people are asked to work in ways that obliterate all other parts of their lives.

Also: we need to hammer the last nail into the coffin of multi-tasking. No, you can’t safely drive and hold conference calls, nor can you text while driving. And checking emails while in meetings means you may as well not be there. What modern businesses need isn’t distracted Blackberry addicts but human beings who haven’t forgotten the gifts of focus, concentration and mindfulness.

When the cognitive scientist Dan Simons looked at the vast mountain of evidence that demonstrates the futility of multitasking, he was inevitably asked whether there was anything we could do to enlarge the capacity of our minds. The answer was an emphatic “no.” There are hard limits to what our brains will do and no amount of Baby Mozarts or Brain Trainers will alter that. Practice, Simons says, will improve specific skills but not general abilities. Doing Sudoku will make you better at Sudoku; it won’t raise your GMAT scores.

In the twenty-first century, we take it for granted that our lives will be constantly interrupted by e-mails, instant messages, and mobile phone calls. But new research is showing that the fast-paced, multitasking lifestyle may actually be hampering workers' productivity rather than enhancing it.

The New York Times (Mar, 2007) has an interesting article highlighting some of this research. "Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes," David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan said in an interview with the NYT. "Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information."

The NYT then showed confirmation of these findings by Microsoft research scientist Eric Horvitz, who found that workers at the Redmond-based software company took an average of 15 minutes to return to the task they were working on after being interrupted by a phone call, e-mail, or instant message. "I was surprised by how easily people were distracted and how long it took them to get back to the task," Horvitz said.

Trying to do two things at once can be disadvantageous even if the tasks are relatively simple. René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University, recently published a study where subjects were asked to perform a number of basic image and sound recognition tasks. The researchers found that answers were delayed by about a second when asked to do two tasks at once. For many activities in life, a delay of one second won't make a significant difference—although it can make carrying on a conversation with a multitasker somewhat irritating—but in some situations, such as driving, it can mean the difference between life and death.

These sorts of studies are becoming more and more widespread. Last year, Ars reported on research showing that learning abilities are significantly impaired when trying to do more than one task at once. Even a small distraction such as a noticeable sound playing in the background can hamper the formation of "declarative memory," which is necessary for a full understanding of a new idea.

The problem lies in thinking that human brains work in a similar fashion to a computer. On any typical PC, the operating system can quickly jump back and forth between running tasks by saving any important task information, something modern processors can do in mere nanoseconds. The human brain, however, does not context-switch in the same way. We keep an inordinately large amount of information in our heads at one time, but not all of it is quickly accessible. The more complicated the task being performed, the more information has been moved into immediate storage, but this requires an intense concentration that can be easily broken. In computer terms, our context-switching penalty is extremely high. Joel Spolsky has written about this problem being a serious issue for computer programmers.

So if multitasking is such a drain on productivity, why do so many of us do it? One issue is that enabling technologies such as the Internet, e-mail, and instant messaging provide easily accessible distractions. Another problem is that most people, especially managers, are unaware of the downsides of heavy multitasking. Often, job offers specifically look for "good multitaskers" and workers who "do well in busy environment."

The people who multitask the most are the ones who are worst at it. That is the surprising conclusion of researchers at Stanford University, who found multitaskers are more easily distracted and less able to ignore irrelevant information than people who do less multitasking.

"The huge finding is, the more media people use the worse they are at using any media. We were totally shocked," Clifford Nass, a professor at Stanford's communications department, said in a telephone interview.

The researchers studied 262 college undergraduates, dividing them into high and low multitasking groups and comparing such things as memory, ability to switch from one task to another and being able to focus on a task. Their findings are reported in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. When it came to such essential abilities, people who did a lot of multitasking didn't score as well as others.  Still to be answered is why the folks who are worst at multitasking are the ones doing it the most.

It's sort of a chicken-or-egg question.

Is multitasking causing them to be lousy at multitasking, or is their lousiness at multitasking causing them to be multitaskers?  Is it born or learned?  In a society that seems to encourage more and more multitasking, the findings have social implications. Multitasking is already blamed for car crashes as several states restrict the use of cell phones while driving. Lawyers or advertisers can try to use irrelevant information to distract and refocus people to influence their decisions.

In the Stanford University study, the researchers first had to figure out who are the heavy and light multitaskers. They gave the students a form listing a variety of media such as print, television, computer-based video, music, computer games, telephone voice or text, and so forth.

The students were asked, for each form of media, which other forms they used at the same time always, often, sometimes or never.
The result ranged from an average of about 1.5 media items at the low end to more than four among heavy multitaskers. Then they tested the abilities of students in the various groups.
For example, ability to ignore irrelevant information was tested by showing them a group of red and blue rectangles, blanking them out, and then showing them again and asking if any of the red ones had moved.

The test required ignoring the blue rectangles. The researchers thought people who do a lot of multitasking would be better at it.

"But they're not. They're worse. They're much worse," said the lead researcher. The high media multitaskers couldn't ignore the blue rectangles. "They couldn't ignore stuff that doesn't matter. They love stuff that doesn't matter," they said.

Perhaps the multitaskers can take in the information and organize it better? Nope. "They are worse at that, too," said the lead researcher. "So then we thought, OK, maybe they have bigger memories. They don't. They were equal" with the low multitaskers, he added.

Finally, they tested ability to switch from one task to another by classifying a letter as a vowel or consonant, or a number as even or odd. The high multitaskers took longer to make the switch from one task to the other.

This particularly surprised the researchers, considering the need to switch from one thing to another in multitasking.

"They couldn't help thinking about the task they weren't doing," lead author Eyal Ophir said. "The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can't keep things separate in their minds."

The next step is to look into what multitaskers are good at and see if the difference between high and low multitaskers is one of "exploring" versus "exploiting" information.

"High multitaskers just love more and more information. Their greatest thrill is to get more," he said. On the other hand, "exploiters like to think about the information they already have."

REFERENCES

Eysenck, M.W. (1993). Principles of cognitive psychology. Hove, UK: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Halpern, D. (2000). Sex differences in cognitive abilities. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Hewlett Packard. (2005, April). Abuse of technology can reduce UK workers’ intelligence: HP calls for more appropriate use of “always-on” technology to improve productivity. UK: Author.

Just, M. A., Carpenter P. A., Keller T. A., Emery, L., Zajac, H., & Thulborn, K. (2001). Interdependence of nonoverlapping cortical systems in dual cognitive tasks. NeuroImage, 14, 417-426.

Mahany, B. (2005, November 26).The trouble with multitasking. KansasCity Star, pp. Features E9.

Pew, R., & Mavor, A.(Eds.). (1995). Modeling human and organizational behavior: Application to millitary simulations. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Rubinstein, J.S., Meyer D.E., & Evans, J.E. (2001). Executive control of cognitive processes in task switching. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27(4), 763-797.

Seven, R. (2004, November 28). Life interrupted: Plugged into all, we`re stressed to distraction. Pacific Northwest: The Seattle Times Magazine, Retrieved April 1, 2006, from http://seattletimes. nwsource.com/pacificnw/2004/1128/cover.html.

Shellenbarger, S. (2003, February 28). Juggling too many tasks could make you stupid. Career Journal, Retrieved January 31, 2006, from http://www.careerjournal.com/columnists/workfamily/20030228-workfamily.html.

 Article Written and Copyrighted by Doug Worthington 2010.  Posted with Permission by Doug Worthington.