Multitasking Is Dangerous

How Frequent Task Switching Costs Time and Sanity

One of the most alluring things about smart phones is that it feels like you’re able to accomplish more. You can check your email while watching TV, you can catch up on tweets while listening to a lecture, you can watch a movie with your family while reading the news… or can you?

Placing our attention onto something takes both time and effort. Choosing to focus on something means tuning other things out so that you can concentrate on the task at hand. That takes work, mental energy and it takes time.

I had just started attending a local gym on campus and I was trying to figure out what sort of exercise I could do without realizing how miserable I was. I confess this is a bit of a fool’s errand but I was hopeful that there was some activity which was so all-absorbing, so totally engaging that the misery would be left behind.

I had always loved spending time in the pool or lakes as a kid so I imagined that swimming might be a good candidate for my ideal activity. I knew some swimmers in high school and they seemed to really enjoy the activity.

When I readied myself for that first day of swimming I made sure to bring everything, my swim suit, goggles, towel, willingness to stand naked in a public shower, all those things you need to swim at a gym. That took about 5 minutes. I also wanted to do some strength training while I was there so I changed into my normal workout cloths and headed out the door, another minute or two.

When I arrived at the gym I stashed my swim-gear in the locker room which took a bit of time, then I lifted some weights and returned to the pool to get my swim on. Of course I had to shower first, then put my suit on which was about another 5 minutes, much to my frustration. Finally I was able to swim some laps, get really tired, towel off, and do the whole process in reverse since I wasn’t about to walk home in my suit.

Of course, once I was home I had to change out of my workout cloths back into my street cloths so I could go about my day. All this took about 2 hours, much longer than expected. I very quickly gave up both swimming and lifting in the same visit. I had spent way too much time changing.

This example from my life is somewhat contrived but it demonstrates my point adequately. Just like when we do special physical activities we need specific gear, when we do special mental activities we call forth from our mind all sorts of context and this takes time. Consider some questions you might ask yourself at the start of a task: where did I leave off? how is this spreadsheet formatted? who did she mention was in the hospital? have I been to this place before? and consider that recalling new information every time you switch tasks, much like in my cloths-changing bonanza, takes time away from every task.

I wanted to workout, I didn’t set out to change my cloths a lot, but that’s what I spent a good bit of my time doing. I’ll bet when you try and work on an email while having a conversation with your partner you don’t set out to spend a lot of time remembering what train of thought you were trying to follow, but that’s exactly where some of your effort will go.

Now, you might be thinking that I would have figured out a more clever way to optimize my route between home and gym. Maybe I could leave my suit there, maybe I could go right after showering at home. That’s true, there is some room for optimization but there is a fundamental, irreducible cost which will never go away. This too is true cognitively.

This impairment far outweighs any sort of optimized context-switching pathways the brain has developed. After all, do you spend more time starting a task or doing that task? Imagine in my exercise example that I could make my cloths switching almost instantaneous but the effort required to do so left me so tired that I could barely workout in the first place. Would that be a worthwhile trade? I don’t think so.

So what is it about multi-tasking that makes it so appealing? If it’s hurting productivity and literally rewiring your brain so that you can’t focus even when you want to, why is multitasking more popular than ever? That’s not a question I’ve read much research on but my guess is that it has to do with our cultural obsession with business. We are almost pathologically busy. It would seem our lives are an over-inflated balloon, near bursting and we all want to maximize our productivity. Here’s the kicker: multitasking with technology makes you feel more productive. In Alone Together Sherry Turkle puts it like this

I do want to take a minute hear to mention that there are things we can do simultaneously. You’re unlikely to cause much of an issue if you read on the toilet or fold cloths on the phone. Multitasking is fine for the occasional, relatively mindless task but when this becomes the norm for highly engaging tasks we have a problem.

Like junk food, multitasking feels good at first but in the end has a high cost. Will we settle for having our anxieties soothed by the ever more rapidly changing contexts of our digital lives or will we face our fears of unproductivity in a way that leads us to true focus.

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