When Not to Multitask
Nicholas Carr, author of The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, introduces a lesson in generating deeper insights from The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, by Daniel J. Levitin
We
should be thankful for our ability to multitask. If we couldn’t
shift our mental gears quickly, we wouldn’t be able to have a
conversation while cooking a meal, listen to music while composing
an email, or walk and chew gum at the same time. Life would be dull.
But
as neuroscientist Daniel Levitin explains in the excerpt below,
multitasking can all too easily become pathological. When we expend
too much of our mental energy skipping from one thing to the next,
we cut ourselves off from the highest forms of thought our brains
are capable of. Conceptual and critical thinking, insight and
ingenuity emerge only when we screen out distractions and focus our
minds.
Turning
off the multitasking instinct is becoming ever more difficult. Our
modern technological environment seems designed to scatter our
attention. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect distraction machine
than a smartphone. But making the effort to escape the informational
whirlwind remains essential. A calm mind is a fruitful mind. The owl
is wiser than the magpie.
—Nicholas
Carr
An
excerpt from chapter chapter 7 of The
Organized Mind:
Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
We
all want to believe that we can do many things at once and that our
attention is infinite, but this is a persistent myth. What we really
do is shift our attention rapidly from task to task. Two bad things
happen as a result: We don’t devote enough attention to any one
thing, and we decrease the quality of attention applied to any task.
When we do one thing—uni-task—there are beneficial changes in
the brain’s daydreaming network and increased connectivity. Among
other things, this is believed to be protective against Alzheimer’s
disease. Older adults who engaged in five one-hour training sessions
on attentional control began to show brain activity patterns that
more closely resembled those of younger adults.
You’d
think that people would realize they’re bad at multitasking and
would quit. But a cognitive illusion sets in, fueled in part by a
dopamine-adrenalin feedback loop, in which multitaskers think that
they are doing great. Part of the problem is that workplaces are
misguidedly encouraging workers to multitask . [Stanford professor
Clifford] Nass notes a number of societal forces that encourage
multitasking. Many managers impose rules such as “You must answer
email within 15 minutes” or “You must keep a chat window open,”
but this means you’re stopping what you’re doing, fragmenting
concentration, Balkanizing the vast resources of your prefrontal
cortex, honed over tens of thousands of years of evolution to stay
on task.
This stay-on-task mode is what gave us the pyramids, mathematics,
great cities, literature, art, music, penicillin and rockets to the
moon (and hopefully—soon—jet
packs).
Those kinds of discoveries cannot be made in fragmented 2-minute
increments.
It
is a testament to our cognitive flexibility and neural plasticity
that we are able to go against all this evolution, but at least
until the next evolutionary leap in our prefrontal cortex,
multitasking leads to not more work but less, not better work but
sloppier work. Adding to this, every day we are confronted with new
Facebook and Instagram updates, new YouTube videos, Twitter streams,
and whatever new technology will replace them in the next year or
two. As of this writing, there were thirteen hundred apps for mobile
devices being released every
day.
“Cultural forces, and the expectation that people will respond
instantly, and chat and talk and do all these things all at once,
means all the pressure is going that way,” Nass says.
The
companies that are winning the productivity battle are those that
allow their employees productivity hours, naps, a chance for
exercise, and a calm, tranquil, orderlyenvironment
in which to do their work. If you’re in a stressful environment,
where you’re asked to produce and produce, you’re unlikely to
have any deep insights. There’s a reason Google puts Ping-Pong
tables in their headquarters. Safeway Stores, a $4 billion grocery
chain in the U.S. and Canada, has doubled sales in the last 15 years
under the leadership of Steven Burd, who, among other things,
encouraged employees to exercise at work, through salary incentives,
and installed a full gym at corporate headquarters. [Burd retired in
2013.] Studies have found that productivity goes up when the number
of hours per week of work goes down, strongly suggesting that
adequate leisure and refueling time pays off for employers and for
workers. Overwork—and its companion, sleep deprivation—have been
shown to lead to mistakes and errors that take longer to fix than
the overtime hours worked. A sixty-hour work week, although 50%
longer than a forty-hour work week, reduces productivity by 25%, so
it takes two hours of overtime to accomplish one hour of work. A
ten-minute nap can be equivalent to an extra hour and a half of
sleep at night.
—Nicholas
Carr
Copyright
© 2014 by Daniel Levitin. Reprinted by arrangement with Dutton, a
member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, a Penguin Random House Company.
All rights reserved.
by Nicholas
G. Carr
PA
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