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November 11, 2009
Does Multitasking Make Us Less Productive?
With an ever-rising number of demands on our daily attention, most of us are performing several tasks at once. But does multitasking improve our productivity, or does it actually get in the way of accomplishing tasks?
The quickening pace of business in recent years already made it seem as if those who couldn't handle a tidal wave of work would be left behind. Add to that the number of jobs lost over the past year and half, and it's clear that layoff survivors are swamped with more tasks than ever before.
As a result, many workers turn to multitasking in an attempt to tackle several duties simultaneously. Technology reinforces this tendency, with employees concurrently answering e-mail, searching the Web and taking phone calls, sometimes all on the same device.
However, researchers at Stanford University have concluded that multitasking may actually impede productivity, reducing the quality of our work and the rate at which we accomplish it. Their study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in August, found that people who divide their efforts between multiple tasks pay less attention, have poorer control over their memory and experience more difficulty switching from one job to another than those who focus on completing one task at a time.
The Stanford University study tested a group of 100 students composed of both "high multitaskers," who regularly use four or more media simultaneously, and "low multitaskers," who engage with no more than two media at a time.
"Results showed that heavy media multitaskers are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory. This led to the surprising result that heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability, likely due to reduced ability to filter out interference from the irrelevant task set," the study explained.
"We were shocked to find out that the high multitaskers did worse than the low multitaskers in all three basic aspects of successful multitasking," Clifford Nass, a communication professor and one of the study's authors, said in a Web Worker Daily report.
The three areas in which non-multitaskers excelled: 1) the ability to focus on relevant information while ignoring irrelevancies, 2) keeping information organized within the brain and 3) the amount of time necessary to mentally switch between multiple tasks.
Although many people assume that those who multitask successfully must have a great deal of control over how they direct their thoughts, the Stanford research team found that this is usually not the case.
"We kept looking for what they're better at, and we didn't find it," Eyal Ophir, a researcher in Stanford's Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab and the study's lead author, said in an announcement of the findings. "They couldn't help thinking about the task they weren't doing. The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can't keep things separate in their minds," Ophir added.
Heavy multitaskers generally displayed slower response times to changing conditions, usually because they became more easily distracted by unrelated information or stimuli, which was then stored in their short-term memory, later interfering with their ability to recall pertinent details.
"There are some possibly frightening implications of the study. If it's not very reversible, then the way the culture has become might be pushing us all to become more and more distractible and less and less able to focus over sustained periods of time," Gary Aston-Jones, professor of neuroscience at the Medical University of South Carolina, told Health.com.
Given the climbing unemployment rate and increasing average productivity in the United States, it stands to reason that fewer workers are handling more responsibilities, and many them are likely multitasking in an effort to keep up their output. The problem is that, if true multitasking is impossible, then workers who attempt to multitask are actually slowing themselves down.
"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," Edward M. Hallowell, psychiatrist and author, told the New York Times.
A 2007 report on information technology and its effect on worker productivity highlighted the importance of keeping multitasking at a low level, claiming that "productivity is greatest for small amounts of multitasking but beyond an optimum, multitasking is associated with declining project completion rates and revenue generation."
When confronted with a daunting quantity of work, perhaps it is better to avoid trying to tackle multiple tasks simultaneously, instead focusing on assignments one at a time. This strategy might turn out to be a more effective way to manage a heavy workload, and it will certainly be gentler on the nerves.
Earlier
Worker Productivity Soars in Third Quarter
Resources
Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers
by Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass and Anthony D. Wagner
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Aug. 24, 2009
Does Multitasking Make You More Productive?
by Karen Leland
Web Worker Daily, Nov. 2, 2009
Media Multitaskers Pay Mental Price, Stanford Study Shows
by Adam Gorlick
Stanford University, Aug. 24, 2009
Drop That BlackBerry! Multitasking May Be Harmful
by Theresa Tamkins
Health.com, Aug. 24, 2009
Multitasking Can Make You Lose ... Um ... Focus
by Alina Tugend
The New York Times, Oct. 24, 2008
Information, Technology and Information Worker Productivity
by Sinan Aral, Erik Brynjolfsson and Marshall W. Van Alstyne
The National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2007
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8 CommentsBefore reading the whole article I already had come to the same answer from my personal experience and observation. Our culture have become so informationally overloaded, and the requirements to keep our heads above water in the workplace and at home makes for persons who cannot focus on problem-solving and even on our personal relationships.
There comes a point where we must say stop, too much on my plate. Cell phones and PDAs may keep us informed and in touch, but they also keep us on a tight rope with little slack.
November 11, 2009 4:29 PMThe mere fact that I am able to comment on this article while doing all my other tasks in my typical workday, must cause my boss concern for my productivity. Then again, working on Veteran's Day, when most others are enjoying the day off, makes me feel less guilty. But maybe if I can jam in at least ten more projects before I go home........
November 11, 2009 4:38 PMAs a young product engineer in the "old days" before e-mail and even pre-fax machine, we had time to study a blueprint before making a design recommendation to our customers. If we had a question that couldn't be answered over the phone, we would mark up the drawing and send it via "snail mail". During the time the print (and question) were in the mail, we would have the additional time to actually think about the design or the problem. Given that additional time, I'm convinced that our decisions were better decisions then they are now that we're expected to have instant answers to go with our instant messaging and Skype video while sitting on the train with our laptops.
November 11, 2009 5:35 PMI have far too many examples over many years. I have witnessed the harsh reality that the degree of thoroughness of a completed project or task is often a direct function of the dilution of that project or task by too many others. There is an lesatic limit and it is highly variable by individual, their capacity to begin with, their experience, their commitment, and a host of other related factors. You might be a multitasking fool but often you are only fooling yourself. Multitasking allows one to go wide and shallow without ever having the ability to go narrow and deep. Where that is an absolute necessity, that is where the trouble begins. Lots of flailing, lot's of gloss...
November 12, 2009 3:29 PMTechnically, most of what we call "multi-tasking" is actually rapid task switching. No locus of control in digital data processing can execute more than one instruction at a time. Studies of human beings indicate that the only time humans can do "two things at once" is when one of them is reflexive, requiring no conscious intervention, i.e., knitting while talking. Only extremely gifted people, fewer than one in a million, are able to actually follow two separate verbal communication streams at the same time. Computers "multi-task" by actually multi-processing - while one CPU is doing one thing, others are stacking and unstacking instructions, fetching and storing data, etc. Humans are not so constructed - we have only one brain, and one conscious focus, and can consciously focus on only one thing at a given instant of time. All real productivity is achieved by extreme focus, devoting full attention to the given task and excluding all other stimuli and thoughts. Indeed, the help of "background music" in worker productivity is to drown out all other stimuli while demanding no attention of itslef, facilitating focus on the task at hand without distraction. Engineers who do not have to listen to announcements or answer their telephones are proven to be at least half again as productive as those who do. Numerous traffic accidents are caused by inattention to the road, when someone is trying to do something else while driving. I do not think you will find any industrial psychologist who considers the attempt by people to multi-task at work as anything but a detriment to worker productivity, based on decades of evidence. Multi-tasking by humans is an illusion, a crock, not a real thing, and certainly not a source of greater rather than lesser productivity. We are not machines!
November 13, 2009 5:30 PMThe real question is how soon...
We already multitask ... In the Internet environment it's a
necessity, when things don't come in right away ... In fact
browsers tend to create flack that way: refusing to switch!
That's what kills productivity-- When you can't, multitask.
Even single-focused-tasks are multitasking mental-activity.
But your three-ball-tennis-example suggests other troubles:
Webstyle tasks all look alike and take time to re-identify;
Webstyle tasks require the same mental-activity: not-multi;
Webstyle tasks are finger-clicking passive-mental activity.
And ~~strange~~ new skills start to emerge... like, Rhythm-
typing-clicking and composing sentences to the same length!
Calling it 'multitasking' doesn't make it more than a task.
Ray.
November 18, 2009 5:49 PMNot long ago, a woman in our town stopped a stop sign and then proceeded to drive her car into the path of an oncoming dump truck. She was involved in a cell phone conversation at the time. Enough said about multitasking.
November 19, 2009 8:47 AMI have never seen this in writing, but in my 20+ year career I have observed an expectation that engineers juggle between 3 and 5 tasks "simultaneously." By that word, I do not mean having all 5 in front of you at the same time, but that you spend an uninterrupted block (from an hour to a day) on each before turning to the next; and exploit inevitable dead time (i.e., when you have designed a printed circuit board and placed it and all the parts on order, there is nothing to do on this task until they come in).
I have also experimented with stretching beyond the 5-task ceiling and find that as you spend more or your day moving papers between your filing cabinet and desk (both the virtual and physical manifestations thereof); you also take a penalty on ramp-up time (for most engineers: between 10 & 20 minutes) from the time you start the task until you are productively working on it, as both absorb more of your day.
To-do lists are great as long as you keep them short. When mine accumulates more than 7 bullets it becomes hard to process, and at 20 is entirely useless.
An undocumented barrier to productivity are tasks that are almost (but not quite) identical. I support a product in which 4 microprocessors sample AC signals 12x/cycle. They support 6, 7, 6, & 9 such channels; respectively; and if I work on more than one of them in the same day I have trouble keeping these numbers straight.
November 19, 2009 9:17 AM
