The Myth of Multi Tasking

I recently offered to help a friend whose 18 year old teenager needed skills in essay writing.  He was in his final year and needed better marks to get into Uni.  Essay writing is one of those things that helps people assemble and articulate ideas in a systematic structured manner.  Such a skill doesn’t come naturally and requires quite a bit of effort and practice.  I guess I’ve been practicing for 40 years and I was led to believe that Tom was open to some coaching.

As I sat down with the teenager I couldn’t help but notice the iPod in the pocket, iPhone on the desk and the array of other distractions in the room.  When we opened up the laptop and started with  brief introduction the phone rank, it just had to be answered.  It was a mate, what was happenin’, didn’t seem that important to me but to a teenager belonging and identity is more important than food, not unless you happen to be at Macdonalds at the time.  I could still hear JJ Cale pumping out of the earbuds of the iPod so I asked him to switch the iPod off and was curious as to why someone so young was into JJ Cale. Now I was getting distracted too.

The laptop had a range of screens open so I asked to close them so we could start on an essay framework, when an SMS came in, we had to look at that and quickly text back, it was super important.  There was a breakup going on between a boy and girl and Tom was alerted to a dialogue going on Twitter and facebook.  So a quick flit to Twitter and facebook and then we could settle was the promise.

We finally got to to the essay after 30 minutes and opened up his last essay so I could see how he went about structure etc.  Whilst I was reading the screen Tom didn’t want to waste any time so he was back into texting and it looked like a bit of sexting from what I glanced at.  He turned on some music, ‘it helps me relax’ he said.  Tom just couldn’t cope with concentrated silence.

After 45 minutes we began to make some progress into the first sentence and his dad knocked on the door to see if we were doing OK.  I told him we had only just started.  After 90 minutes I had to go and realised why Tom was not achieving at school but there was little I could do about it without a total change to habits and discipline.

Research shows that humans are biologically incapable of processing attention rich input simultaneously.  Whether male or female, humans cannot multi-task, its a myth.  Our brain can only focus on things sequentially and if we try to divide that brain we also divide the attention and concentration applied to each unit of division.  Some studies show that a person who is interrupted on a task takes 50% longer top accomplish that task.  Unfortunately, that interruption also increases the likelihood of error.  This is a problem for workers too and also for supervisors who may interrupt workers for conversations about safety or work program.

The idea of multi-tasking originated in the computer industry, a processor can handle tasks simultaneously but a human brain is not wired in such a way.  Indeed, it is easy to show that a human brain can be distracted from a task with a simple bit of emotional stimulation.  A computer isn’t wired for emotional distraction, we are, its part of  our flight and fight instinct.  We may be working intensely on a task when an attractive person walks in the room, dressed to take notice and in less than a few seconds our concentration is gone.  This all has massive implications for the management of distractions in the workplace.  Not the control of attractive people but the understanding that we cannot multi-task.

New research shows that our ability to pay attention and to concentrate is connected to memory but I will discuss this next time.