The Tale Of Multitasking
At Cinnamon & Bluebells, we promote a lifestyle that encourages us to slow down and savour every moment. We love spending quality time with those that we cherish. We like indulging in activities such as preparing special meals, going on long walks, reading, meditating and pampering our body and soul with relaxing baths and self care routines. Why are these things so important?
Because without them, our contemporary hyperactive lifestyles throw us off balance and affect our productivity and our health.
Our Multitasking Reality
Do you remember life before multitasking?
You probably need to go as far back as to remember (or imagine) a life before the internet and mobile phones and laptops and tablets and Netflix and constantly updating social media. But it’s not just technology anymore.
We live in a hyperkinetic environment, where trying to multitask and accomplish simultaneously as many tasks as possible, is not just a requirement or a goal. It has become the norm. Starting at a very young age, our entire lives, almost every single one of our waking moments, is a multi-task challenge.
We brush our teeth, while listening to the news, or drive our cars with the radio on. We do homework while choosing Spotify playlists and watching the latest tiktoks. We eat while checking posts on social media, and write emails with Netflix on in the background. We go for a run with a podcast in our ears and listen to our partner talking while texting someone else. We care and cook for our children while we scroll through recipes on Pinterest and go shopping while we chat on our phones.
And whenever we are on a screen, be it a laptop, a telly, a phone or a tablet, we are automatically and repeatedly bombarded by multiple data, which constantly demand our brain’s processing and attention.
And it’s all mostly done habitually.
A couple of decades ago, when hand held electronic devices came into the spotlight, there was an intense glorification of the concept of multitasking. In every work environment, the ability to tackle multiple activities at once was considered a high performance skill.
Working on several tasks concurrently means that you are more productive, more effective and can yield better and faster results, right?
Well not quite.
The Myth
There are numerous studies today, proving that the concept of multitasking is in fact, a myth. According to scientists, the human brain can allocate attention only to one task at a time. So when we attempt to multitask, what we are actually doing is switching from one task to the other. This process overloads and taxes the brain’s working memory and it comes at the expense of our actual productivity and efficiency.
Can We Train Our Brains To Multitask?
Dr Arthur Markman, a professor in the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, says that the brain is designed to handle multitasking when actions or activities are so familiar they have become habits. This is why when a young child is learning how to walk, each movement requires intense concentration, while adults generally have no trouble walking while at the same time carrying on a conversation.
"We have these brain mechanisms in the frontal lobe that I like to call the 'stop system,' because when we're switching between tasks, they help us stop what we're doing and engage, or re-engage, in something else. But when something is a habit, we can repeat it without thinking too much about it. Yet some tasks, no matter how many times we perform them, require too much engagement and active thinking to become truly habitual“ Dr Markman said.
Dr David Meyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and director of the school's Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory, similarly explains that humans, are typically good at balancing tasks that use unrelated mental and physical resources.
"Once you start to make things more complicated, things get messier, and as a result, there's going to be interference with one or more of the tasks," Meyer said. "Either you're going to have to slow down on one of the tasks, or you're going to start making mistakes."
The Costs
According to Dr Gloria Mark, a professor in the department of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who has done extensive research on multitasking in the workplace, found that on average, people switch activities every 3 minutes throughout the day. Workers took an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from interruptions such as phone calls or answering e-mails and return to their original task. They do not spend much time focusing on single tasks and as a result they were recorded to procrastinate, feel burnt out and have high levels of stress. This in turn, can cause long-term health problems if not controlled, and contributes to the loss of short-term memory.
In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London. The study found that “workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.” The psychologist who led the study called this new “infomania” a serious threat to workplace productivity.
And some of the effects are long lasting.
In a 2010 study, Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert found that people spend almost 47% of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re currently doing. And that has its own associated cost. “The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost,” the authors say.
Too often we are still mentally engaged with work when we should be spending time with our family, for example. It's a phenomenon known as "attention residue," which means we are still thinking about one task, while we have physically moved on to the next. It is a harmful consequence of multitasking.
How Multitasking Affects Learning
In another recent study, Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that multitasking adversely affects how we learn.
“Even if we learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so we cannot retrieve the information as easily.
We have to be aware that there is a cost to the way that our society is changing, that humans are not built to work this way. We’re really built to focus. And when we sort of force ourselves to multitask, we’re driving ourselves to perhaps be less efficient in the long run even though it sometimes feels like we’re being more efficient.”
Christine Rosen, senior editor at The New Atlantis says that “for the younger generation of multitaskers, the great electronic din is an expected part of everyday life. And given what neuroscience and anecdotal evidence have shown us, this state of constant intentional self-distraction could well be of profound detriment to individual and cultural well-being. When people do their work only in the interstices of their mind-wandering, with crumbs of attention rationed out among many competing tasks, their culture may gain in information, but it will surely weaken in wisdom.”
The Solution: Monotasking
It is not possible for us to control all outside stimuli of our daily lives and we all inevitably multitask at times as we go about our day. This is why we must actively strive to develop a monotasking mindset in the areas that we do control, such as our work and our self care routines.
How Can We Monotask?
We start by setting realistic goals in our day and prioritising the most important tasks. Then we decide how much time we need for each task and set this time to spend focusing deeply on this task only. The most important aspect though, even more so than focus, is the elimination of distractions. Even our own desire to be productive can sometimes become a distraction. Turn unnecessary screens off, put your phone on airplane mode, close irrelevant windows on your laptop, place yourself in a quiet place, do whatever you need to help your concentration.
Allocating specific time slots to complete tasks, is an important tool for monotasking. For example, instead of responding to all emails as they come in, set a predetermined time to perform this task. You can use a similar system for making phone calls, sending texts, or visiting and updating social media. By grouping these activities together in designated slots, you save time and reduce the need to multitask and are able focus on each job with your undivided attention. In other words, you will be monotasking.
Another very important and often overlooked aspect, is negative time.
Negative time is time set aside to give yourself a chance to rest and recharge. This break is absolutely vital neurologically, as it allows your brain to integrate, problem solve and connect dots in the background on a much deeper level.
Set a time when work starts and when it ends. Take a couple of hours a day to do something relaxing, like going for a walk, meditating, reading, being in nature. The activity is less important. The key is to be present and engage in this restful setting. This way, you will return to your work refreshed and with a clear perspective.
Some Timeless Wisdom
The multitasking and monotasking concepts have obviously changed drastically over time. The wisdom around these concepts however, has been around for centuries.
British statesman Phillip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773), was a renowned man of letters. On the 25th of April 1747, he wrote a letter to his son delivering advice that remains especially applicable today, encouraging focus, engagement, being present, and staying in the moment.
He wrote:
“A man is fit for neither business nor pleasure, who either cannot, or does not, command and direct his attention to the present object, and, in some degree, banish for that time all other objects from his thoughts.
There is time enough for everything, in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once; but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.
This steady and undissipated attention to one object is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.”
