Posts by Therese Walsh

Last month I began a series on multitasking with a post called Monotasking: The Forgotten Skill You (and I) Need to Re-Claim, ASAP. Since then, I’ve continued my study of time and mind management (because that’s really what we’re talking about here) and interviewed multitasking expert Dr. David Meyer, Professor and Chair of Cognition & Cognitive Neuroscience, at the University of Michigan. I spoke with Dr. Meyer for over an hour, and we covered a lot of ground, some of which I’ll share with you here today. One of my first questions was simple on the surface but a little knotty in reality:

What, exactly, qualifies as multitasking?

Does multitasking mean complex multitasking? Simple multitasking? What about these words from the world of business: switchtasking and background tasking and continuous partial attention? James Scott Bell referred to present-moment multitasking, then serial monotasking in comments last month. Bob Bois mentioned Monkey Mind.  For our purposes it doesn’t really matter what you call it. If you’re trying to do more than one thing at the same time for much of your day, this is for you. (Serial monotasking is safe, James. That’s actually an ideal way to work.)

When I asked for your feedback last month, for you to reveal your primary reason for multitasking, most of you said you multitask because you can’t seem to shut it down; it is like a compulsion. Only a few of you said you multitask because you’re good at it. Others said they had to multitask to stay on top of things. I’m going to leave that latter group for later, and not just because it’s alliterative. This month let’s talk about what might be behind the compulsion. Right after we talk about Keith.

The Curious Case of Keith Cronin

Our very own Keith wrote in comments last month:

I’ve earned a living for decades as a true multitasker – playing drums professionally. Drumming requires each of your four limbs to do something different – usually directly related, but sometimes not. And many drummers also sing while they play: task number five. It’s essentially like rubbing your belly while patting your head – while riding a unicycle and whistling.

Jealous of this skill—and especially of the unicycle—I was eager to bring up Keith’s situation with Dr. Meyer. Here’s what he had to say about it.

First of all, [Keith] might just be performing one task—the task of music production. I would suggest that for this drummer, learning came into play, and he essentially learned to perform the overall task of music production through a lot of practice. If you practice enough with certain kinds of tasks you can combine them so you just wind up with one task; these things become integrated. The tasks for which this is possible are the ones that don’t conflict with each other physically or mentally.

Makes sense, no? There are plenty of tasks that you can do concurrently without effecting the outcome because they don’t conflict with each other physically or mentally. Writing while walking on the treadmill. Listening to an audio book while driving or running. Cleaning the kitchen and talking on the telephone. And on and on.

Natalie Hart had […]

This isn’t an easy post to write, because I’ll need to admit to something that’s a little embarrassing. Lately, at times, it’s been difficult for me to read. Yep, read. Not because I’ve forgotten how or because I lack the desire to do so, but because my mind leaps to Else as soon as I begin reading anything lengthier than a Twitter or Facebook post, which, of course, includes novels.

Not good.

Just focus, I tell myself. And I do for a few graphs, and then I’m gone again, chasing a stray thought set off by something I’ve just read or imagined with some un-still part of my mind.

Is it ADD? I suspect not, as I can focus on other things and this seems a relatively new problem for me.

So what’s going on?

A 21st Century Problem

I had an interesting conversation with a friend last week. Let me preface this tale by saying my friend is a brilliant programmer who works at Microsoft. As we chatted with our group over dinner, he admitted that he’s recently had trouble focusing on long texts, including books. There are a few caveats. He can focus on audiobooks. (Same here.) And he focuses best when in an environment that’s somewhat noisy and bustling–like a Starbucks. (Likewise, I focus best while wearing headphones and listening to a background-noise app.)

We talked about how we both felt plagued by this weird new thing, and then it hit me. “We’ve become–had to become–professional multitaskers, and it’s almost as if we’ve retrained our brains,” I said. “Now we can’t focus for any length of time on one thing even when that’s our choice.”

He agreed. We respond to emails while on the phone. We look over our RSS Feeds while brushing our teeth. We make coffee with one hand while scrolling through our Twitter feed(s) with the other. We have eleven windows open at once online, for two or three or four projects. Often we have not only one screen before us, but two–phone and computer, phone and television, computer and iPad. And even when we are physically doing just one thing, our minds are often on something—or two, then three somethings—completely different. Because brains are adaptable, and this is what they’ve been taught, this is how we’ve programmed them to behave.

Our minds have become fragmented because we are living fragmented lives.

The Truth of the Fallacy

That conversation with my friend inspired me into research mode. What caused this thing that was happening to us? Was it common? And—most importantly—what might be done about it?

I’d heard that multitasking is a fallacy—that when we think we’re doing two things at once, we’re usually only doing one and not as well as we might believe–so I wasn’t surprised by the evidence found in support of that idea. But one study seemed particularly pertinent because, as mentioned, my friend works at Microsoft:

A classic 2007 study of Microsoft workers found that when they responded to email or instant messaging alerts, it took them, on average, nearly 10 minutes to deal with their inboxes or messages, and another 10-15 minutes to really get back into their original tasks. That means […]