When you come into work, what’s the first thing you do? Check email, right? You walk into – depending on your particular job – anywhere from 25 to 1,000 emails each morning. Each one of these emails needs your attention, and some of them require you to take action. So you start at the top. Skimming some emails, skipping some emails, and actually reading some emails. You get through about 15% of them when someone walks in and strikes up a conversation. Without even thinking about it, you’re suddenly not able to pay attention to your emails any more.
Why though? You’ve always been so great at multitasking!
The Brain is Not Capable of Multitasking the Way We Want It to.
The brain functions much like a CPU for a computer. Typical modern CPUs have multiple cores, and each core can be running its own task independently. In the same sense, the brain has different parts dedicated to different things. Some things are automatic – breathing, walking, blinking and eating for example. These things don’t take up much processing power and don’t require any attention. So it’s possible to walk and have a conversation because you’re using different “cores” in the brain. Each process is isolated and handled independently. The brain has the ability to isolate tasks, but not at will and not as we typically want it to. For example, you can enjoy classical music while reading through your emails, but as soon as you put on a song with lyrics, it’s harder to focus on your emails. The brain is trying to comprehend the words communicated in the song and the words communicated in text at the same time. It’s fighting itself for resources, and you aren’t able to comprehend either communication as efficiently as you could if you would focus on one. Unless one task is completely on auto pilot, the brain will fight for resources.
Traditional Multitasking is Task Switching. Task Switching is Very Inefficient
Task switching is essentially an attempt at managing distractions. The practice is inefficient even for high-level multitaskers as proven in the following studies.
When people claim to be “expert multitaskers,” what they are doing is task switching. The brain simply can not simultaneously process stimuli from reading emails, replying to text messages, and pay attention in a meeting. In 2009, Stanford University’s Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony Wagner studied the levels of Cognitive control on media multitaskers. What they found was that when presented with distractions while accomplishing a task, the high multitaskers had actually performed at lower levels than those identified as low multitaskers. The findings show that high multitaskers are really good at responding to outside stimuli – distractions. You don’t want to respond to distractions. The low multitaskers were better able to isolate and complete their assigned task.
These findings were repeated in February 2014 when Michigan State University’s Altmann, Hambrick, and Trafton investigated the effects of interruptions on complex tasks. The study had participants perform a sequence of tasks ranging in difficulty, but not individually hard. They found that when people were distracted, they were highly likely to repeat a previously completed task in the sequence or skip one. Task switching, even to a simple distraction task, had confused people enough that they had become inefficient in completing the initial sequence.
Get Through Your Task Saturated Day with 3 Basic Steps: Plan – Focus – Execute
In a world where most people are task saturated as it is, the way to accomplish everything we need to get done is to plan for your work, focus on the immediate task, and execute the plan. For the planning step, it’s important to be organized. I use Trello to keep organized and to break projects down into tasks. I also group like tasks and get similar things done at the same time, even if they’re for different projects.
Once I’ve identified which task is next, I focus exclusively on that task until it’s complete. You want to have laser like focus on the task at hand and check it off of your to-do list as soon as possible. We’ve talked about Parkinson’s law before, but this is the best time to apply it. Parkinson’s law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” so we know that given a week to complete a task, the task takes a week to complete. To test this, I literally gave myself 10 minutes to empty and load the dishwasher as well as wash, dry and put away the pans and clean the counter tops. The first time, it took me 12, and I hate doing the dishes.
Apply that principle to your daily work load. Give yourself 15 minutes to get through all of your email in the morning, and focus on nothing but your email. Then give yourself 10, then 5 minutes and a task that would previously take hours to complete is done. I could write an entire series on dealing with email, and this is a bit of an overstatement, but I think you understand where I’m going with this.
Multitasking is a thing of the past. In order to be the most efficient person you can, remember to plan your day accordingly, focus exclusively on the task at hand, and execute it as efficiently as possible. Thank you again for reading. I’d love to hear your comments, questions, or suggestions. You can contact me through the site here or on twitter @timanderson_.
– Tim
Photo Credit: Charles Williams; bottled_void; Dimitris Kalogeropoylos