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We recently launched a weekly team post entitled Thursday Thrive! which is intended to offer snackable ideas on how to grow and develop well (and vigorously). Subjects include tips on productivity, wellness, and team collaboration in an effort to offer insights that will enable us individually—and as a team—to thrive.
A recent offering was inspired by Rachel Feintzeig’s Wall Street Journal article entitled: The Lies We Tell Ourselves About Multitasking. Here are some highlights from the article as well as articles from Stanford University Neuroscience and the American Psychological Association (resource links below).
- Our brains aren’t wired to juggle tasks: The tools of our lives, from car dashboard screens to buzzing phones, fracture our attention while promising that we can do it all, all the time. Except we can’t.
- One thing at a time: We need to get back to monotasking—doing one thing at a time. The first step is weaning ourselves from distraction, says David Strayer, a University of Utah professor who has done pioneering research on how brains handle tasks. Not only do our phones and notifications disturb us, we’ve also grown to crave their interruptions, too.
- Your brain on multitasking: When we take on a task, several brain networks dealing with attention and cognitive control are involved. These are the frontoparietal control network, the dorsal attention network, and the ventral attention network. Attempts to multitask can create interference among these networks, and this can lead to slower processing as well as mistakes, explains Kevin Paul Madore, a neuroscientist at Stanford University.
- Switching costs when multitasking: Although switching costs may be relatively small (sometimes just a few tenths of a second per switch), they can add up to large amounts when people switch repeatedly back and forth between tasks. Thus, multitasking may seem efficient on the surface but may actually take more time in the end and involve more error. Meyer has said that even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40 percent of someone’s productive time.
Additional resources:
Multitasking: Switching Costs (American Psychological Association)
https://www.apa.org/topics/research/multitasking
Why Multitasking Does More Harm Than Good (Stanford University Neuroscience)
https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/why-multitasking-does-more-harm-good
The Lies We Tell Ourselves About Multitasking (WSJ article: paid subscription required)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lies-we-tell-ourselves-about-multitasking-47938445?st=t6acdukg6bn6ft7&reflin
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