The brain is designed to do only one thing at
a time. If you have to juggle, combine a mundane activity with something that
requires complex thinking
The veritable task-juggler that you are,
being on a conference call with a client while shooting off several emails and
reading the sales report your team just finished is second nature to you.
Congratulations, multitasker!
You jump from task to task with the grace of
a gazelle and are highly commended for your daily feats.
But wait...
Didn’t you resend some of those emails
because you forgot to attach the presentation?
Didn’t you call your client again to
reconfirm certain details of the conversation?
What about the glaring typo in the sales
report, how did you miss that?
Even if you fall in the 2% of the
population—the super-taskers—whose performance does not deteriorate even when
multiple demands are placed on their attention, for the remaining 98% of us
(the humans), every time we try to focus on more than one thing at a time,
performance suffers.
“When we speak of multitasking, what we
really mean is that we are switchtasking: switching rapidly between one task
and another. Yet, each time we switch, no matter how quickly that switch takes
place in our mind, there is a cost associated with it. It’s an economic term
called switching cost—and the switching cost is high,” writes time management
expert Dave Crenshaw in The Myth Of Multitasking: How “Doing It All” Gets
Nothing Done.
A study, Executive Control Of Cognitive
Processes In Task Switching, published in a 2001 issue of Journal Of
Experimental Psychology: Human Perception And Performance, determined that
for all types of tasks, subjects lost time when they had to switch from one
task to another.
This “time cost of switching” was higher as
tasks got more complex. Time costs were also greater when the participants
switched to tasks that were relatively unfamiliar. They got up to speed faster
when they switched to tasks they knew better.
Even short interruptions like the few seconds
it takes to silence a buzzing smartphone can have a surprisingly huge impact on
your ability to accurately complete a task.
A 2013 study, Momentary Interruptions Can
Derail The Train of Thought, published in the Journal Of Experimental
Psychology: General, conducted by Erik Altmann, professor of psychology at
Michigan State University, US, and his associates, found that interruptions of
roughly 3 seconds doubled the error rate of the task. Interruptions of 4.5
seconds tripled the number of errors.
So why was the error rate increasing with
time?
“The answer is that the participants had to
shift their attention from one task to another. Even momentary interruptions
can seem jarring when they occur during a process that takes considerable
thought,” writes Prof. Altmann in a 2013 article on the university’s website.
It seems our brain can do only one task at a
time. “The truth is your brain is not designed to do more than one thing at a
time. It literally cannot achieve this, except in very rare circumstances.
Instead, it toggles back and forth from one task to the next. For example, when
you are driving while talking on the phone, your brain can either use its
resources to drive or to talk on the phone, but never both. Scans show that
when you talk on the phone, there is limited activation of your visual
brain—suggesting you are driving without really watching. This explains how we
can sometimes end up places without knowing exactly how we got there,” writes
Sandra Bond Chapman in the book, Make Your Brain Smarter: Increase Your
Brain’s Creativity, Energy, and Focus.
If you are still keen on keeping up text
messaging while watching TV and jumping from one website to another while
writing the marketing report: Beware. Multitasking might be slowing you down. A
2009 study, published in the Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences
journal, found that heavy multitaskers—those who multitask a lot and feel that
it boosts their performance—were actually worse at multitasking than those who
like to do a single thing at a time.
If juggling a variety of activities is
fraught with so many disadvantages, why do we continue to multitask on a daily
basis?
In a study, published in 2012 in the Journal
Of Communication, researchers found that multitasking makes you feel better
even if it hurts your performance. In the study, students who were watching TV
while reading a book reported feeling more emotionally satisfied than those who
studied without watching TV. However, they also reported that they didn’t
achieve their cognitive goals as well. “Cognitive needs are not satisfied by
media multitasking even though they drive media multitasking in the first
place. Instead, emotional gratifications are obtained despite not being
actively sought. This helps explain why people increasingly multitask at the
cost of cognitive needs,” says the study.
You can still walk your dog while speaking to
your BFF on the phone, though.
Research shows that tasks that take up
separate areas of the brain can be clubbed together.
Crenshaw refers to these tasks as
“background-tasking”. These are mindless or mundane activities that occur in
the background and don’t require your attention, like watching TV and eating
dinner or making a cup of coffee while talking to a client.
The key is to match activities like writing
or reading that involves complex thinking and judgement, with tasks that your
brain can handle on an autopilot.
Therefore, you can study effectively while
listening to instrumental music since reading comprehension and processing
instrumental music engage different parts of the brain. However, your ability
to retain information will decline significantly when reading and listening to
music with lyrics because both tasks activate the language centre of the brain.
STAY FOCUSED
Follow these three steps
u Focus without distractions. Put your phone
on silent, turn off email notifications, tell your colleagues you need 30
minutes of uninterrupted time.
u Take regular breaks. After every 20-30
minutes, the brain starts feeling tired and looks for distractions. Step away
from the task and go for a walk or just look out of the window. Even a 2-5
minute break will refresh your brain.
u Make a to-do list to record your top 2 or 3
priority tasks for each day. Ensure that you get these done. Accomplishing your
important tasks daily will make you feel productive.
Source | Mint – The Wall Street
Journal | 15 June 2015
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