Don’t talk and drive.
Why multitasking is not a thing to be proud of.
We chat with our best friend while listening to an online lecture on the Data Protection (in the Study of Content Strategy). Another email comes in, which we answer quickly (because it’s done). Our favourite playlist is playing in the background (turned down anyway) and then we remember this one book that one of the professors was talking about recently, and we quickly google where it’s cheapest and order it right away.
It’s all quite normal daily life. But is that a good thing?
Is it great if we get a lot done at once so that we can finally, finally sit on the sofa, watch the 4th part of the 3rd season of our current series while we eat chips and clarify a few details for tomorrow’s presentation with our favourite colleague (on MS Teams, of course, as recently demanded by the employer, so that all media and work groups are always at hand), briefly ask the son via Whatsapp if everything is ok anyway, or why he hasn’t been in touch for a fortnight again ;-).
It’s just a normal, cosy end to the day. The next day it’s hot again anyway. The inbox is the to-do list, the phone rings every 7 minutes and the messages on MS Teams, Mattermost and WhatsApp have to be checked and answered immediately if possible.
We are all slowly becoming aware that all this is not so healthy: digital detox apps are being downloaded in droves, (bad) habit trackers as well and many tips and tricks are circulating on how to manage the dependency on the smartphone, set up screen-free times, and so on and so forth … but is that all it takes? Is it enough to simply put the devices aside?
The problem is more fundamental, and the effects are more devastating for us than we think. Multitasking does something to our brains. It does something to our time. And our creativity.
Stanford University communications professor Dr Clifford Nass, in a podcast on National Public Radio’s Science Friday series called ‘The Myth of Multitasking’, says that our so-called multitasking, applied non-stop every day, wastes more time than we think we gain from it. It destroys our ability to concentrate and takes away our creativity. In a study he found that
“People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand. And even — they’re even terrible at multitasking. When we ask them to multitask, they’re actually worse at it. So they’re pretty much mental wrecks.”
And it goes even further:
“Our brains have to be retrained to multitask (…) — brains are remarkably plastic, remarkably adaptable. We train our brains to a new way of thinking. And then when we try to revert our brains back — our brains are plastic but they’re not elastic. They don’t just snap back into shape.”
Here it must be briefly inserted that there is actually no such thing as multitasking. Of course we breathe while we walk, read while we eat. But as soon as several non-automated tasks (such as breathing) of approximately equal complexity are performed simultaneously, performance suffers significantly because attention is divided.
One could also say that the term is simply wrong because we do not multitask but switch: Dr. Nass:
“(…) our prefrontal cortex, the thinking part of our brain, yes, we’re basically switching back and forth. We only have about three bits’ worth of information we can mess with at any one time.”
It gets particularly interesting when you look at this ‘multitasking’ system in the context of (car) driving.
Of course, driving itself is the main task, but the results of the study show that if I tweet, text or talk on the phone ‘at the same time’ (regardless of whether I am using the hands-free system or directly on the phone!), my ‘driving’ task takes second place while my attention is on talking or texting. And that — as we can all imagine — can turn out fatally, says Dr Nass.
Phil Dobson also states in The Book of Thinking
“Multitasking is a myth. Your brain can’t do it, it’s just that their attention is shifted.” Dobson adds up, “Multitasking is thought to lower productivity by up to 50% and you make up to 50% more mistakes.
So what to do? There is a beautiful story about this in Zen Buddhism:
A monk who was completely focused on the inner life was asked why he was always able to be so focused despite his many tasks: “How do you shape your life so that you are the way you are, so calm and so at peace with yourself?”
The monk said, “When I stand, I stand; when I walk, I walk; when I sit, I sit; when I sleep, I sleep; when I eat, I eat; when I drink, I drink; when I am silent, I am silent; when I look, I look; when I read, I read; when I work, I work; when I pray, I pray …. .”
Then the questioners interrupted him: “That’s what we do. But what else do you do, what is the secret of your being human?”
The monk answered the questioners again: “When I stand, I stand; when I walk, I walk; when I sit, I sit; when I sleep, I sleep; when I eat, I eat; when I drink, I drink; when I speak, I speak; when I am silent, I am silent; when I look, I look; when I hear, I hear; when I read, I read; when I work, I work; when I pray, I pray . ..”
Then the curious said, “We know that now. We do all that too!”
But the monk said to them, “No, that is not what you do: when you stand, you are already walking; when you walk, you have already arrived; when you sit, you are already striving; when you sleep, you are already awakening; when you eat, you have already finished; when you drink, you are not tasting enough; when you speak, you are already answering objections; when you are silent, you are not focused enough; when you look, you are comparing everything with everything else; when you listen, you are already considering questions; when you read, you are always wanting to know; when you work, you are anxiously worrying; when you pray, you are far from God… .“
–(Delivered)
For our times and their demands, there is a good ‘instruction manual’ for the brain in the aforementioned Buch des Denkens by Phil Dobson. Step by step Dobson takes us to better brain fitness. Part of this is to stop multitasking, or at least identify and minimise the distractors so that you can focus fully on one thing at a time more often.
From brain owner to brain user. Which is part of the flap text of the above book and, for me, a very good conclusion.
Oh no, one more thing. The best friend of multitasking under the heading of ‘not getting your sh** done’ is, by the way, in my eyes, procrastination. Elisabeth Reisinger and Caro Mayerhofer, two wonderful fellow students, have written very good articles about this. Worth reading them!
