Make breakfast. Pack lunches. Feed the pets. Groom the offspring. Groom the spouse. Groom self. Check email. Solve world hunger. Drink more coffee. Ponder. Get dressed. Remember you need half-and-half. Schedule the afternoon.
Morning is go time. And it’s never, ever time to go in any single direction. Instead, the morning is the time to multitask. Some of us are better at it than others.…
In fact, there really is a medical term to describe those of us who can’t multitask. It’s called strategy application disorder, and it’s a kind of frontal lobe dysfunction in which people show “disorganization, absentmindedness and problems with planning and decision making in everyday life despite normal performance on traditional neuropsychological tests,” according to research published by Paul Burgess in the journal Psychological Research in 2000. Take a second to digest that. The lovely person in your life who is normal but for the fact that he or she can’t possibly do more than one thing at a time may have a brain that is shaped differently than yours. Your loved one may be biologically programmed to fold laundry, make sure the guinea pig has been brought in from the outside run, or think about the weather, but not any of these things simultaneously. You wouldn’t make fun of someone with a concussion, and you shouldn’t make fun of your monotasking loved one either. If you do, it makes you a bad person.
On the opposite end of this spectrum is a group of people recently identified as supertaskers. According to a 2014 study by University of Utah psychologist David Strayer, just as the monotasking brain is different from most brains, the supertasking brain is too—exactly 2 percent of us have areas of the anterior cingulate cortex and posterior frontopolar prefrontal cortex that make us able to do many things at once. The rest of us 98 percent may have exactly the same brainpower as supertaskers in terms of IQ and other goodies, but when we add task A to task B, we take longer and perform worse than if we had focused on task A and then transitioned completely to task B.
The trick to successful multitasking is not, as you might expect, splitting your mind into two sections, each in charge of monitoring and completing a demanding task. The trick is switching the brain’s attention between tasks so quickly that it looks like you’re doing two things at once. You start with your spotlight on task A and swivel the light to task B, moving back and forth so quickly that it appears you can spotlight both at the same time. Psychologists call this task switching.
When you switch from one demanding task to another, it takes time to get oriented—you pay a time and/or an accuracy penalty, and both tasks suffer. That is, unless you’re a supertasker. There’s debate whether you can actually change your brain enough to go from being an average-tasker to a supertasker, but there are certainly rules that can help you fake it. Here are four things you can do to improve your multitasking ability:
1. If you can make cognitively demanding tasks less cognitively demanding, you’ll pay a lower penalty when you combine them. It makes sense: if packing lunches is automatic, you’ll be able to do it while cooking an omelet. If you have to think about lunches, it takes away from your ability to think about the omelet. By making any demanding task more automatic, you reduce its demands on your attention and so have more attention for a second (and third, and fourth …) task.
2. Pick tasks that use faraway areas of the brain—say, a motor task like flipping the omelet along with a cognitive task like remembering which kid likes which snacks. If two tasks are far enough apart in your brain, it’s almost like you’re not even doing two things at once.
3. Practice “fixing” tasks in your mind. For example, if you can remember exactly where you left off making an omelet, you can learn to come back to exactly that point without paying the “switching penalty” that would otherwise be involved in reorienting yourself. Practice saying “I am chopping onions” or “When I come back I will add cheese” before switching to another task, and it should make it easier to switch back to the omelet later.
4. Outsource the monitoring that tells you when to switch tasks. If you’re worrying about when you need to flip the omelet while packing lunches, packing lunches is going to suffer. The trick is called task cuing—set your kitchen timer to remind you when the omelet is ready to flip (cue when you should switch tasks). If you are helping to bring your strategy-application-disordered loved one up to speed, task cuing might look like an ongoing narrative that reminds this person what he or she should be doing at any given second. Try it: your loved one will totally thank you.
Multitask Training
If you’re willing to do a little work to improve your multitasking ability, search online for the phrase “task switching” to find games like the Trail Making Test, the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task, and the Stroop Color and Word Test. Basically, these games force you to switch nimbly between sets of rules while inhibiting distractions. Task-switching practice makes for nimble multitasking.