10/20/2019 ALINA TUGEND Multitasking Can Make You Lose . . . Um . . . Focus

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ALINA TUGEND

Multitasking Can Make You Lose . . . Um . . . Focus

Alina Tugend (b. 1959) was a columnist for the Business section of the New York

Times from 2005 to 2015 and is the author of Better by Mistake: The Unexpected

Benefits of Being Wrong (2011). Her work has also appeared in the Los Angeles

Times, the Atlantic, Worth magazine, and other publications. This report on

multitasking was published in the New York Times in 2008.

AS YOU ARE READING THIS ARTICLE, are you listening to music or the radio? Yelling at your children? If you are looking at it online, are you emailing or instant-

messaging at the same time? Checking stocks?

Since the 1990s, we’ve accepted multitasking without question. Virtually all of us

spend part or most of our day either rapidly switching from one task to another or

juggling two or more things at the same time.

While multitasking may seem to be saving time, psychologists, neuroscientists

and others are finding that it can put us under a great deal of stress and actually

make us less efficient.

Although doing many things at the same time — reading an article while

listening to music, switching to check email messages and talking on the phone —

can be a way of making tasks more fun and energizing, “you have to keep in mind

that you sacrifice focus when you do this,” said Edward M. Hallowell, a psychiatrist

and author of CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap!

(Ballantine, 2006). “Multitasking is shifting focus from one task to another in rapid

succession. It gives the illusion that we’re simultaneously tasking, but we’re really

not. It’s like playing tennis with three balls.”

Of course, it depends what you’re doing. For some people, listening to music

while working actually makes them more creative because they are using different

cognitive functions.

But despite what many of us think, you cannot simultaneously email and talk on

the phone. I think we’re all familiar with what Dr. Hallowell calls “e-mail voice,”

when someone you’re talking to on the phone suddenly sounds, well, disengaged.

“You cannot divide your attention like that,” he said. “It’s a big illusion. You can

shift back and forth.”

We all know that computers and their spawn, the smartphone and cellphone,

have created a very different world from several decades ago, when a desk worker

had a typewriter, a phone, and an occasional colleague who dropped into the office.

Think even of the days before the cordless phone. Those old enough can

remember when talking on the telephone, which was stationary, meant sitting

down, putting your feet up, and chatting — not doing laundry, cooking dinner,

sweeping the floor, and answering the door.

That is so far in the past. As we are required, or feel required, to do more and

more things in a shorter period of time, researchers are trying to figure out how the

brain changes attention from one subject to another.

Earl Miller, the Picower professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute

of Technology, explained it this way: human brains have a very large prefrontal

cortex, which is the part of the brain that contains the “executive control” process.

This helps us switch and prioritize tasks.

In humans, he said, the prefrontal cortex is about one-third of the entire cortex,

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while in dogs and cats, it is 4 or 5 percent and in monkeys about 15 percent.

“With the growth of the prefrontal cortex, animals become more and more

flexible in their behavior,” Professor Miller said.

We can do a couple of things at the same time if they are routine, but once they

demand more cognitive process, the brain has “a severe bottleneck,” he said.

Professor Miller conducted studies where electrodes were attached to the head

to monitor participants performing different tasks.

He found that “when there’s a bunch of visual stimulants out there in front of you,

only one or two things tend to activate your neurons, indicating that we’re really

only focusing on one or two items at a time.”

David E. Meyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, and his

colleagues looked at young adults as they performed tasks that involved solving

math problems or classifying geometric objects.

Their 2001 study, published in The Journal of Experimental Psychology, found

that for all types of tasks, the participants lost time when they had to move back and

forth from one undertaking to another, and that it took significantly longer to switch

between the more complicated tasks.

Although the time it takes for our brains to switch tasks may be only a few

seconds or less, it adds up. If we’re talking about doing two jobs that can require real

concentration, like text-messaging and driving, it can be fatal.

The RAC Foundation, a British nonprofit organization that focuses on driving

issues, asked 17 drivers, age 17 to 24, to use a driving simulator to see how texting

affects driving.

The reaction time was around 35 percent slower when writing a text message —

slower than driving drunk or stoned.

All right, there are definitely times we should not try to multitask. But, we may

think, it’s nice to say that we should focus on one thing at a time, but the real world

doesn’t work that way. We are constantly interrupted.

A 2005 study, “No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work,”

found that people were interrupted and moved from one project to another about

every 11 minutes. And each time, it took about 25 minutes to circle back to that same

project.

Interestingly, a study published last April, “The Cost of Interrupted Work: More

Speed and Stress,” found that “people actually worked faster in conditions where

they were interrupted, but they produced less,” said Gloria Mark, a professor of

informatics at the University of California at Irvine and a co-author of both studies.

And she also found that people were as likely to self-interrupt as to be interrupted by

someone else.

“As observers, we’ll watch, and then after every 12 minutes or so, for no apparent

reasons, someone working on a document will turn and call someone or email,” she

said. As I read that, I realized how often I was switching between writing this article

and checking my email.

Professor Mark said further research needed to be done to know why people

work in these patterns, but our increasingly shorter attention spans probably have

something to do with it.

Her study found that after only 20 minutes of interrupted performance, people

reported significantly higher stress, frustration, workload, effort, and pressure.

“I also argue that it’s bad for innovation,” she said. “Ten and a half minutes on one

project is not enough time to think in-depth about anything.”

Dr. Hallowell has termed this effort to multitask “attention deficit trait.” Unlike

attention deficit disorder, which he has studied for years and has a neurological

basis, attention deficit trait “springs entirely from the environment,” he wrote in a

2005 Harvard Business Review article, “Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People

Underperform.”

“As our minds fill with noise — feckless synaptic events signifying nothing — the

brain gradually loses its capacity to attend fully and gradually to anything,” he

wrote. Desperately trying to keep up with a multitude of jobs, we “feel a constant low

level of panic and guilt.”

But Dr. Hallowell says that despite our belief that we cannot control how much

we’re overloaded, we can.

“We need to recreate boundaries,” he said. That means training yourself not to

look at your BlackBerry every 20 seconds, or turning off your cellphone. It means

trying to change your work culture so such devices are banned at meetings.

Sleeping less to do more is a bad strategy, he says. We are efficient only when we

sleep enough, eat right, and exercise.

So the next time the phone rings and a good friend is on the line, try this trick: sit

on the couch. Focus on the conversation. Don’t jump up, no matter how much you

feel the need to clean the kitchen. It seems weird, but stick with it. You, too, can learn

the art of single-tasking.

Engaging with the Text

1. According to Alina Tugend’s research, what are the EFFECTS of

multitasking? Tugend doesn’t say much about the causes of this practice.

Why do you think she doesn’t? What do you think are the causes?

2. How well does Tugend maintain a TIGHT FOCUS on her topic in this report?

Given the claim she makes in her title, why might a tightly focused topic be

especially important for helping readers understand the issue?

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3. Tugend DEFINES several terms in her report. Locate one or more of these,

and discuss what the definitions contribute to the report.

4. What is Tugend’s STANCE toward multitasking? Point out specific phrases

that reveal her attitude. How appropriate is her stance, given her subject

matter?

5. For Writing. Undertake your own study of multitasking. Spend time

observing students, faculty, and staff in common spaces on your campus —

the library, the student union, the dorms, and so on — to see how much

multitasking occurs. In addition, discuss with classmates, friends, and

relatives their habits regarding multitasking. Write a REPORT on what you

observe and what folks say about how beneficial or how detrimental

multitasking can be.

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