Discussion on:

If you like to surf the net at the office, can you complain about your workload?

When one looks at the quality and quantity of work performed, it appears that most so called multitasking is really better described as "scattered attention" - people do a weak job of doing several things intersperced rather than doing a good job at one thing after another. That's OK when you are sort-of watching TV, playing a game which can be paused and resumed, answering an occasional text message, and eating some pop tarts. If your job similarly needs only superficial and intermittant attention to do well, that may work (say, a non-busy receptionist?).

But people don't truly watch you-tube videos and compose a well structured document at the same time. At the very best, they could interleave the two such that, say, 30 minutes of you tube watching and 30 minutes of actual document writing can be done in 60 minutes total but split into many smaller interleaved chunks rather than two big chunks - in which case they are still being non-productive on the job for 30 minutes of that hour, albeit in smaller chunks. It's going to be like the jest that many tiny slices of cake have fewer calories than a single big slice of the same size. They are still going to take longer to get the work done than if they were not interleaving, and/or do a sloppier job.

And this is the best end of the scale - more often the frequent "context switches" actually make them less efficient at both tasks, taking 75 total minutes to watch 30 minutes of you tube and to write a document which would have taken them 30 minutes if they focussed on it.

A friend is a college professor tells me that a majority of incoming students today are very poor at written communications, even compared to a decade ago. They may think they as inherently great multitaskers did their homework at the same time that they talked with friends and watched TV, but frequently they only "got by" without learning quality focus of attention, and it shows later in life. Grade inflation (and recalibrating things like SAT scores) has masked the effects of this.

There are jobs which inherently require good interleaving of tasks - for example frequent interruptions and switching attention among many uncompleted tasks. Doing one thing well and getting to a logical pausing point before changing tasks may just not be possible. The best folks in these tasks are still not putting 100% attention on several tasks at once, they are just efficient at dividing their time such that each task gets a fraction of their attention interleaved with other tasks. But even with these people, if some of those tasks were personal and not work related, they have diverted that fraction of their total attention away from getting their jobs done. If its a tiny fraction, then it has little impact; if it's a large fraction then they may be cheating their employer of their expected contributions just as surely as somebody who focused on their job for 5 hours before taking off the last 3 (but charging for 8) - the "multitasking" myth just allows them to pretend it isn't happening.

One important insight into this is that research is showing that even people who think they multitask well actually don't - and in fact, they often accomplish less while multitasking than people who do not self describe as being good at it. One hypothesis is that people who think they are good multitaskers are on average just better at ignoring the discomfort of not doing a good job - ie: being a self described good multitasker really just means they are more comfortable with / less stressed by multitasking because they can numb out to the negative consequences better.

So if you think you are a good multitasker, the chances are that you are actually below average at *successfully* multitasking. If you think you can spend a good portion of your day browsing the internet for personal subjects and still give your employer 8 hours (or nearly 8 hours) of real attention, then you are almost certainly fooling yourself, and trying to fool your colleagues - or you have a low value job which requires hardly any competence or attention to do successfully.

Another friend in internal tech support tells me that his experience is that many young workers think they are just naturally great with technology because they grew up with it, and indeed they are fine at setting up a VCR or light configuration of a cell phone (which got them a lot of praise as a genius from grandma) - but often their tech knowledge still superficial, and they are uninterested in learning anything which they cannot master in 15 minutes via graphical user interfaces intended to make it simple. Obviously this doesn't include everybody and there are plenty of very bright young folks too - but the generalization about younger folks being naturals with technology (or multitasking) may often be more of a "strong narrative" than a reality.

Likewise, next time you try to buy, say, an auto part from some clerk who is simultaneously chatting with a friend by cell phone, see if you think you are getting their full attention and are just as well serviced as if they had not been "multitasking". It just doesn't happen, and it's time to replace the myth of multitasking well (as if several things get full simultaneous attention), replacing it with the concept that interleaving of tasks almost always comes at significant cost, tho the extra waste is smaller for some people than others.

nt

I agree wholeheartedly! In fact, I'm going to copy and paste your post into a Word doc to give to my "multitasking" business partner. Thanks!

I am sorry if English is not my native language. I assume your arrogance comes from the fact that you can write on my native language without any mistakes?
Lastly, your attempt to support your point of view by insulting other people tells me how much your opinion is valuable. So long. I don't think I will be commenting on this article anymore since your kind of posts make it pointless.

n_egii@

You may not believe this, but English is not my native language either and I am not sorry for that.
However, I made the effort of learning the language to be more competent than the majority of English speakers.
Unfortunately, most immigrants simply can't be bothered to make this effort and then complain that they are being discriminated against.
It is just plain laziness that prevents people from learning the language of their host country properly.

so the point of your microtantrum is?

doesn't undermine his argument. We need you to give reason(s) why his argument is flawed.

Typos aside I completely agree that there are roles and tasks which can be effectively multi-tasked in the truest sense of the word. I certainly wouldn't ever consider flicking your concious thought between different 'threads' as multi-tasking though... As a software engineer some of my best work comes out of my sub-concious thought processes. Often the best thing for me to do is to stop focussing on a problem and tackle something else a bit less challenging (which can include a quick look at facebook or twitter). Suddenly 10 or 15 minutes later the solution to the difficult problem pops into my head. That's what I call multi-tasking.

Multi-tasking - in the computer world or human world - is defined as doing multiple things at the same time. Human beings DO NOT multitask. Yes, you can flip over to another task after working on something else, but that is task switching, not multitasking. The problem is that trying to flip between too many things fragments your attention to the point that you will do none of the tasks as well as if you had focused on one at a time.

I agree, there is no such thing as milti-tasking for humans. If you do another thing, you stop doing what you're doing previously. As an effect, you end up like you haven't done anything for the day.

Interesting you've documented part of what you were saying. However, your total message would have been more effective had you gone back to proofread and verify that what you wrote was what you meant, with complete sentences, words spelled correctly, no words left out--while you were multitasking. Composing on the fly works for some people, but reading your own work for content takes serious concentration. The next logical question is whether the source you cited actually said what you think or were you "multitasking" and only grabbed part of the meaning.

The way you've attempted to defend "multitasking" makes it read like wishful thinking.

The point of the original post is that the time used to surf the web & check face book updates is time taken from your job. Justifying this behavior by using the term "multitasking' is improper. Any time not focused on what you are paid to be doing is theft from your employer, and sometimes dangerous to passengers on mass transit systems.

What if someone is just a more productive worker than the next, but paid the same? For example, someone who handles 4x the service tickets of another person, all other things being equal (pay, quality of work, etc.). Does that give the more productive worker justification to goof off? I'm not saying yes or no, it's a serious question to ponder.

Perhaps the "more productive worker" got the job because they told their employer (resume, interview) that they were very 'efficient and focused'. Either way, I don't think being more productive ever gives you the right to 'goof off'.

If you had to go under the knife, would you be happy if your surgeon paused to check his twitter updates mid way through just because he's a "more productive worker"? (yes I know it's an extreme example)

Well... I guess it referred to web browsing in general.
It was on the Opera portal, I'll see if I can find it.
EDIT: found it: http://my.opera.com/portalnews/blog/2011/08/23/study-proves-web-surfing-increases-productivity-at-work
Not that I disagree with that post up above...

My quibble is with the idea that an employee doing something not focused on the job is theft. Employment is giving up pieces of your life in exchange for money; you may value your life more than your employer can pay and accept the pay to be able to support yourself and family. The idea that the employer "owns" all of your time while you are on the job is wrong. Most work is task oriented and there are breaks between tasks, so if the employee is doing the tasks given then there is no theft if the employee does something else between tasks. If an employee is not completing their tasks or not working at expected quality then that is a different problem that can be addressed by mentoring, reprimanding or firing the employee.

I tend to agree that with the advent of work-at-home environments the stark boundary between work and personal time has finally become so vague that it is probably no longer appropriate to even try to enforce the distinction notwithstanding a particular narrowly-defined job role. Given that in the early 20th century it was not uncommon for employees to presume a seven day work week and also prohibit employees from taking to one another during the (long) work day, this is come-uplands and some degree of justice for an ongoing underlying presumption that an employer owned you. The fact is that they do not and as at least one other post pointed out, if you meet your job goals,it is not your employers' place to dictate how you do it.

I work in an Engineering office here in Seattle and we have drafters who spend "hours" each day perusing the internet while they are supposed to be accomplishing their drafting. I sit on the other side of the wall each day as they discuss Craigslist ads, fishing sites, write personal emails, Facebook, etc... This all occurs while they have jobs with deadlines sitting on their desk. Walk on the other side of the wall (the drafters cubicles) and all of a sudden "Shazam" everyone is working full bore. Walk back to my desk and keyboard clicks stop and it's back to mouse clicks and occasional typing. Multi-tasking? Not! Wasting my time, the companies time, and the clients time when they don't help meet deadlines. I blame it on poor work ethic and the owners lack of enforcement of company policy. Oh wait, we don't have a written internet policy. Go figure.

are they meeting their deadlines or not?

Each drafter is utilized by more than one Engineer. When a drafter sits on a job and takes 8 hours to accomplish what should only take 4 hours they are affecting the company's bottom line as well as shifting drafting burden to the more productive drafter. I learned to draft so I could avoid missing deadlines and clean up their sloppy work. Milking a job is just one aspect of their "multi-tasking", having them accomplish the work as redlined for them is another because we constantly are handing them work that was not picked up on the first go around. So called "multi-taskers" who facebook, etc. are wasting company resources all the way around.

drafting retailers tend to not be spring chickens and they may know some things about the corporate culture that you do not, such as how much waste goes on far beyond their level of the org chart. Once you have been doing the job for 20 years then you can consider lecturing people about "work ethic" assuming you have not been outsourced or had your retirement money pirated.

I have been with this same company 22 years and know the culture and see the waste that the so called "multi-tasking" described above creates. When someone switches screens as you walk by to appear as if they are working hard on your project or when you pop your head up over the wall and see that they are placing a craigslist ad and at the end of the day they only accomplish four hours of real work but bill your client for 8, that's what I call a "poor work ethic". If I were the owner I would let go those individuals and hire someone who is willing to work for a full days pay and treat me and my clients fairly.

Here's a classic example: driving. There are a lot of things you have to be aware of and all of them contribute to your situational awareness and your ability to constantly adjust to the changing condition. But studies have shown that trying to drive while talking on a cell phone is the equivalent of drunk driving (University of Utah). The problem is that your brain simply CAN'T multitask well on two tasks, even when one of them "seems" to be trivial.

What women actually do better than men is task-switching - not true multitasking. It's exactly like what a CPU does in a computer - they task switch so fast that it _appears_ as if they are doing multiple things at once. In actuality, however, human studies have shown that people are incapable of concentrating on two things at the same time, and it requires concentration to perform most tasks at a quality level.

I knew there was a work for it better than multi-tasking. I'm great at task-switching, not multi-tasking. That's how I get so much work done, I can switch quickly between tasks to get more done. I still focus on one thing at a time. I was having a hard time describing this to my boss, and your analogy makes perfect sense.

"For example, you were doing multitasking while you were writing your comment..How is that not a multitasking? And it did not require you to put significant effort to do that."
All the "tasks" you describe were OPERATIONS dedicated to the TASK of writing the article. That is NOT what is meant by "multitasking." Cooking rice, sauteeing meat,and tossing a salad may seem like multitasking, but they all work toward the goal of "making dinner" and use several mental resources in common. To put it in computer terms, these programs are using a lot of shared files and are going to end up in the same document. Tossing a salad, reserving a hotel for the vacation you're planning in two weeks, and sorting the snail mail IS multitasking, because these tasks don't work toward the same goal and use very little "shared files."

This seems to propose we conform to that of a robot on an assembly line with only one pupose and one job and unable to divert from that task. You approach multitasking negatively when it has many benefits.

I under stand most people can't whisk an egg while flipping bacon at the same time. Multiasking is a state of mind as much as it is physicaly accomplishing more than one task at the same time. I can whisk an egg, turn around and flip the bacon and come back to the egg interleaving these tasks however my mind is simultaneously concentrating on both tasks not just one or the other, else I would only be whisking the egg and never think to flip the bacon. Sure neither task has my full attention but in the end I have completed both together and when the bacon is done the eggs are ready to dump on to the tastey bacon grease and scramble.

That all said multitasking is healthy. Diversions in the work place have proven to make workers happier, more productive, and happy to come back the next day. People sitting at their desk starring at the same screen all day are unhappy, bored, tend to work slower, and oft looking for another job.

juggling is multitasking too.
going to the bathroom is technically multitasking.
driving is multitasking. (which some fail at)
talking and walking is multitasking. (which some fail at)
soccer, football, and basketball are multitasking.

zhahai's point is spot on, our perceived ability to accomplish multiple things a one moment in time is extremely distorted.

to me. Taking breaks allows our brains to perform better.

My reading of the OP implies that "she" is spending way too much time 'multitasking'... while complaining about workload. While I agree that "Taking breaks allows our brains to perform better", a 'break' ceases to be a break when it takes up equal (or more) time as your paid employment, unless you are an elite athlete and put most of your effort into a 9.58 second 100m sprint!

The key thing to realize is that we have the ability to interleave and divide our attention, and that is sometimes extremely valuable - but we are still dividing out attention, not multiplying it.

If you are doing several tasks which have natural "pauses", like cooking, then you can potentially make use of that "dead time" for something else. For example, there's time between putting the egg in the griddle and the first need to flip it, and that time could be used to put bread in the toaster or unwrap the bacon, etc. This kind of interleaving of attention has two benefits: you get to make use of otherwise wasted time gaps when you would otherwise just be passively waiting for something to complete, and you can synchonize the results of several tasks so all of breakfast is done and hot at about the same time. One of the requirements is that each task have a low "context switching" cognitive overhead; for example, when you come back to the egg to flip it, you don't have to spend 5 minutes remembering all the context, you just look at the pan and immediately see if it's ready or not. This is successful interleaving of attention and is undisputed. (Notice however that if this cook is also trying to also respond to text messages, it's much more likely that things will burn - or at least take longer to complete).

There are other jobs which involve focused attention, and which do not have "wasted time" gaps, like creating or revising a complex document, or programming. These tasks tend to suffer from interleaved attention - if you are about to change some nuance of framing of a proposal, or you are considering the tradeoffs in changing the boundary cases of an algorithm, and you suddenly need (or choose) to deal with something else, there's a good chance you will need some time to re-immerse yourself in the complex project. If you switch frequently, this WILL eat into your productivity; if it's only occasionally the cost will be proportionately lower. The first point is that there IS a cost and it can vary.

Also read about the concept of "flow" as studied by psychologists. They can even measure brain waves to discover that for somebody focussed on a complex task, a one minute phone call may interrupt their forward progress for 15 minutes as it breaks the flow state.

By the way, it's also relatively easy to "multitask" tasks which are automatic, like eating or walking using many muscles in coordination, or to some degree driving. However, many studies have shown that cell phone use while driving leads to more accidents, due mainly to the cognitive load from communicating with somebody who is not adapting their behavior to the local context. That is, people may think they are giving 100% attention to the road and also attention to the call, but below their conscious awareness their reaction time and quick judgement skills are suffering (which they won't notice until a situation arises - or they take the wrong turn towards where they used to live).

All that said, of course all of us interleave our attention - it's more a matter of the size of the chunks, and also the degree of choice in timing of context switches (can you get to a "stopping place" before switching?). It's a good thing - in proper balance. They "multitasking myth" does not provide that balance, but instead promotes the idea that (self appointed) "good multi-taskers" are exempt from the tradeoffs involved, but they are not.

The second point was the myth that "a good multitasker" is multipying their attention rather than dividing it, and the implications of that for interleaving of non-work tasks with work tasks. If you were multiplying your attention by multitasking (as many people think they do), then you could give your employer (almost) 8 full hours of solid work, while also writing a novel and chatting with friends and solving sodoku - what a bargain! But you are not - even if you are super-efficient at task switching (or have a cognitivately simple job whose context switches are easy), you are at best just working a partial day which is unrecognized because the "not at work" times are small and distributed individually, even if they add up to a lot of time overall.

Another commenter notes that taking a short break from a difficult mental challenge (eg: 15 minutes on facebook) can sometimes prompt a small breakthrough and solution. I'm very familiar with that phenomenon and support that situation - tho a short walk might be just as effective and better for the health of a mostly chairbound worker. The question is whether this is used judiciously, or whether a once a week positive benefit justified 50 non-productive recreational breaks, or where one fits in between. Some breaks have been shown to be good, but more breaks (or task switches) are not automatically better.

The problem with internet browsing breaks is that they are mostly self-defined without good feedback or accountability. For somebody with a solid work ethic who will not abuse this, no problem. For somebody who would prefer to work as little as possible and browse/game/chat as much as they can get away with, it's unfortunately a real problem. I say unfortunately because I certainly don't like the idea of close monitoring or big penalties or an oppressive work environment - so some balance is needed.

And we can't get to that well considered balance until we dispose of the myth of multitasking, and replace it with understanding that interleaving attention means dividing attention, and that there is in addition some degree of additional lost time in context switching (which depends on the job and the person).

if multitasking was so rare we would not have computer interfaces designed with it in mind. True, that driving is a real-time extreme case where there is actual danger in not doing it well and most cases are not that extreme-but for the most part this is just about some bean counter
measuring someone else's efficiency when the existence of his own Job may be the biggest drag on the company bottom line as any.

A good example of multitasking is talking on the phone to a client and typing up a memo regarding something related to the conversation or entering order related information in a system or in a more ridiculous example sharpening a pencil while on the phone. This way you don't have to do it when the call is over.

In reality, you cannot do two things at the same time, those who might be able to pull it off are in carnivals on unicycles with items on fire.

those carnies..

Actually that is not a good example. Mentally that is one cognitive task. Different pieces of the whole, if you will.

The key here is "cognitive" task. That is a task that requires you to perform higher level brain functions like evaluate, plan, form solutions, make decisions, or have a conversation. These are very different from non-cognitive tasks such as walking, chewing gum, listening to the radio, or passively watching TV.

The human brain can only manage one cognitive task at a time. Don't believe it? Try simultaneously reading a book and holding a conversation with someone on a different topic. You can't do it. You have to switch back and forth between the two tasks, which means you're likely not doing either one of them very well.

I recently read another negative aspect of "multi-tasking" that makes a lot of sense. There is a roughly 25% penalty each time we switch tasks as the brain reorients itself from the old task to the new. An IT analogy would be something like flushing and reloading the cache. While I'm not sure of 25% figure (25% of what?), the penalty itself is obvious. When we switch tasks we have to think about what we have done so far, what is left to do, and what we need to do next. We do not have this penalty as long as we stay focused on the single task.

So what this means is people that "multi-task" by continually switching from one task to another are actually less efficient than someone who stays focused on a task to completion before moving on to the next one. This is all pretty obvious when you step back and objectively observe it.

Many people with ADD or ADHD have adapted well and are actually better multitaskers than the average citizen. My entire life has been fragmented, hyper-active attention regardless of the existence of all of these new distractions (Facebook, etc.). I've had my whole life to prepare and figure out how to beat deadlines with an adequate amount of quality control. I do high quality work, and others consider it that as well. I would say this reality also lends itself to better developed time management skills than your average person.

During college if I was writing a paper I would be the person spending 30 minutes on the web whilst still drafting the best essay the professor received. Your assertion that multitasking causes a lack of focus on high quality work to me seems heinous. When I write a formal business e-mail, I may draft it over the course of 45 minutes, but breaking up what I'm doing allows me to go back and read and catch any mistakes better than someone who just wrote straight through and then re-read all at once at the end (the whole "two eye balls is better than one" really applies to taking a break in between work, too). I see a lot of poorly written e-mails every day.

I'm not everyone, though I'd say you're generalizing a lot.

Maybe it's not that millennials can multi-task better, but rather that so many millennials also have ADD or ADHD.

As another person with ADD, I would tend to somewhat disagree with generalizing your point even tho I personally resonate with it. You may submit excellent essays while splittiing attention, but many people with ADD do not.

It's possible that you are exceptionally skilled and with your intelligence you would submit excellent essays even without distractions (perhaps even more excellent, that's the unknown). The question is - on average, do the ADD students in your class submit similarly impressive essays, or is the correlation more about your intelligence (perhaps despite rather than because of the ADD)?

You also mention developing, in compensation, better time management skills than most. Alas, I don't think that is characteristic of ADD in general - it may say more about your other character attributes than about ADD, just as some blind people make astounding compensations (and many do not).

In honestly I haven't read studies of whether people with ADD have been measured to have better attention interleaving skills as a whole. Perhaps so, perhaps not; I'm open minded about that.

But I know from experience that there are different flavors (not just degrees) of ADD/ADHD (some are excellent at hyperfocussing for extended periods under the right circumstances while others can rarely focus for long), and I suspect there may be different causes and consequences. I don't know any reason that genetic ADD would be higher in millennials, and I wonder if a type of induced neural patterning often lumped under the same ADD/ADHS label might not account for any increase. One might need to find some way (not easy) to unravel types of ADD before getting solid correlations.

The most we can hope for is to describe the general statistical pattern; hopefully we can each recognize and be open to individual exceptions.

not only that but I have actually being dinged for writing complete sentences when some management person went to a seminar on "business English" where they heard that sentence fragments and phrases with bullet points were more efficient. Bullcrap.

Me too! Sigh. I hate "business English" writing because it's dreadful writing.

I also despise that people expect me to write one line emails, so that thirty emails take half the day, rather than 1 good email that has a paragraph of information in it that takes 1 response in a half hour so I can get on with my day.

Your post is 100% accurate and IMHO significantly better (in both content, style and organization) than the original article.

nt

"She" may think she is being more efficient, but if you did some serious testing, you'll probably find she isn't.

It seems 'obvious' that if you measure the same person focused vs multi-tasking, then the focused activities would always win out.

But you don't really have control over that. Is her output (whether focused or not) better than the output from the other workers in the office? That's the only valid measure. worrying about -how- she gets the work done is the sign of a micro-manager.

If you want to see whether people can really multi-task, watch them when they are walking down the street. If they stop walking when they start talking, they can't multi-task. Many have trouble walking and talking at the same time. Drives me nuts when I'm walking behind these people and they suddenly just stop.

Others are fine with this, but get them walking down stairs and talking on the phone, and they start falling over. We all have a limit beyond which we have trouble.

Stopping is actually a body language showing that person is trying to emphases the importance of the message he/she is going to communicate. It is not the sign of a lack of multitasking skills.

... possibly not. It's definitely dependent upon the individual and the context.

Run down a set of stairs while eating.

I find I can walk down them while eating, but if I start to run, I start biting my tongue and the inside of my cheeks.