Multitask or Unitask?

[BigV]

*sigh*

Keep trying, you pseudo-taskers. It just doesn't exist. I'm not the only one to say so, here are a couple of interesting articles that support my position that it's one thing at a time, round and round and round.

Meet the Life Hackers

In 2000, Gloria Mark was hired as a professor at the University of California at Irvine. Until then, she was working as a researcher, living a life of comparative peace. She would spend her days in her lab, enjoying the sense of serene focus that comes from immersing yourself for hours at a time in a single project. But when her faculty job began, that all ended. Mark would arrive at her desk in the morning, full of energy and ready to tackle her to-do list - only to suffer an endless stream of interruptions. No sooner had she started one task than a colleague would e-mail her with an urgent request; when she went to work on that, the phone would ring. At the end of the day, she had been so constantly distracted that she would have accomplished only a fraction of what she set out to do. "Madness," she thought. "I'm trying to do 30 things at once."

Lots of people complain that office multitasking drives them nuts. But Mark is a scientist of "human-computer interactions" who studies how high-tech devices affect our behavior, so she was able to do more than complain: she set out to measure precisely how nuts we've all become. Beginning in 2004, she persuaded two West Coast high-tech firms to let her study their cubicle dwellers as they surfed the chaos of modern office life. One of her grad students, Victor Gonzalez, sat looking over the shoulder of various employees all day long, for a total of more than 1,000 hours. He noted how many times the employees were interrupted and how long each employee was able to work on any individual task.

When Mark crunched the data, a picture of 21st-century office work emerged that was, she says, "far worse than I could ever have imagined." Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What's more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.

A warning on the limits of multitasking

"Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes," said David Mayer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan. "Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information."

The human brain, with its hundred billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections, is a cognitive powerhouse in many ways.

"But a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once," said René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University.

Marois and three other Vanderbilt researchers reported in an article last December in the journal Neuron that they had used magnetic resonance imaging to pinpoint the bottleneck in the brain and to measure how much efficiency is lost when trying to handle two tasks at once.

Study participants were given two tasks and were asked to respond to sounds and images. The first was to press the correct key on a computer keyboard after hearing one of eight sounds. The other task was to speak the correct vowel after seeing one of eight images.

The researchers said that they did not see a delay if the participants were given the tasks one at a time. But the researchers found that response to the second task was delayed by up to a second when the study participants were given the two tasks at about the same time.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by BigV

*sigh*

Keep trying, you pseudo-taskers. It just doesn't exist. I'm not the only one to say so, here are a couple of interesting articles that support my position that it's one thing at a time, round and round and round.

I buy your premise, but keep in mind it depends what tasks you're thinking about. Some manual things, like folding laundry, mowing the lawn, shoveling snow, require minimal mental input. Certainly you can do mental tasks, like budget, grocery, planning or trying to figure out where that squeak in the car is. It depends on the difficulty of the tasks.

[monster]

Originally Posted by BigV

*sigh*

Keep trying, you pseudo-taskers. It just doesn't exist.

Hmmm..

you're a bloke, right? :p


Seriously, it does exist (trust me, I'm a doctor and I do it all the time ) and is a useful tool, but not for academically-loaded tasks.

I can easily fold laundry, use sign language to direct my children to get their own damn snacks and discuss swim team policy on the phone at the same time (and i will probably also wipe one child's nose, remove another's splinter and resort the recycling bin during that couple of minutes). But when I need to deal with the school's weekly scrip order, the kids had better have that video down quiet.....