Observing Multitasking
I notice my attention, or lack of attention, while doing multiple tasks. In my observation notes I use the word “haphazard” a couple of times, indicating that, according to the recordings, it looks like my attention is not fully focused on what I am doing at the time. This observation tells me that I appear to get lost in what I am doing and I lose focus. Consequently, some of the most simple tasks take a while and I work very inefficiently.
—Kathleen
When I multitask, it’s largely undirected and mindless—I’ll move away from my task to check something else, with a plan to make this brief, and then end up doing other work/article reading/Facebooking/anything for a half hour. I would like to become more mindful of these distractions—even, or especially, those simply arising in my own mind—and either ignore them or address them briefly and consciously before returning to my original task.
—Henry
Is multitasking a problem? Some people clearly think so. In July 2009, Clifford Nass, the late Stanford professor of communications, convened a one-day seminar on the impacts of multitasking that was attended by researchers, educators, and parents. Some of the attendees spoke to the benefits of multitasking. But a great deal of the focus, and the emotional energy, was centered on people’s concerns and fears about the phenomenon. “When someone mentions multitasking, people go insane,” Nass observed. Everyone involved clearly realized that more research was needed to understand the positive and negative effects of multitasking, and to provide guidance to parents and workers about when and how to do it productively and when to abstain. Rebecca Randall, of Common Sense Media, spoke to the urgency of people’s concerns. “We can’t wait for the longitudinal research,” she said. “We need guidance now.”1
Recent research has confirmed how common, indeed rampant, multitasking is in American culture today. For more than a decade, Gloria Mark, a professor of information science at the University of California, Irvine, has been conducting ethnographic studies of the American workplace that demonstrate the extent of the phenomenon. Her 2004 study, “‘Constant, Constant, Multi-Tasking Craziness,’” surprised many people by demonstrating how often knowledge workers switch tasks. As Clive Thompson summarized these results in a 2005 article in the New York Times Magazine, “each employee spent only eleven minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What’s more, each eleven-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, twenty-five minutes to return to that task.”2
As for children, a 2010 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8–18-Year Olds, reported that youth were spending more than seven hours a day “consuming media.” But because they were spending so much time using more than one medium simultaneously, they were packing almost eleven hours of media content into those hours. (Although a further study hasn’t yet been published, it’s hard to imagine that these numbers have declined.)3
Research of this kind holds up a mirror to our current practices, allowing us to see what is now the case without making value judgments. But at the same time, as I indicated in Chapter 3, a growing number of studies point to the problematic side of multitasking: that it is less efficient than working on a single task and that the quality of the results may suffer. In the most dramatic case we now face, that of texting and driving, the research findings are definitive: Texting while driving is extremely dangerous.
Yet there is another side to the story. Some prominent educators and researchers argue that multitasking is a valuable, even a necessary, twenty-first-century skill. In an influential report prepared for the MacArthur Foundation, Henry Jenkins, a media scholar at the University of Southern California, has argued that today’s schools ought to devote more attention to fostering new media literacy skills, among them multitasking, which he defines as “the ability to scan the environment and shift focus onto salient details.” In an earlier era, he suggests, schools had primarily taught students the ability to focus narrowly on one thing, and had considered anyone who was unwilling or unable to maintain a narrow focus to be suffering from a disorder. But in today’s world, he argues, both modes of attending are necessary, and neither is inherently superior to the other.4
The picture is further complicated by recent research suggesting that multitasking doesn’t degrade everyone’s performance. People dubbed “supertaskers,” estimated to be 2.5 percent of the population, can actually perform two tasks without becoming overloaded and suffering a reduction in the quality of their output. Indeed, some of these people appear to get better when juggling two tasks.5
So for the most part we don’t yet have the guidance that Rebecca Randall is requesting. Fortunately, I don’t believe we need to wait for definitive studies to tell us how best to multitask or when to abstain. Besides, even if we had such studies, they wouldn’t provide detailed guidance for each and every one of us, considering our differences in cognitive capacity, life experience, and personal preference. If we need guidance now, as Randall suggests, we may be able to get it by investigating our own multitasking behavior, much as we just did with email. I will show you how in this chapter, taking you through a structured exercise that parallels the email observation exercise.
Before we launch into the exercise, though, let’s clarify what we’re talking about. What exactly is multitasking? It basically means performing multiple activities—or “tasks”—at the same time. But there is a common misconception about what “at the same time” actually means. In most cases, we are actually attending to several activities serially, one at a time. Multitasking is thus rapid task switching, not maintaining simultaneous attentional contact with several objects of focus.
So multitasking essentially means moving back and forth between two or more tasks. But then whether or not you’re multitasking (or you consider yourself to be multitasking) depends on what you mean by a task. When you open an email message to read the announcement of an upcoming meeting, then switch to your calendar to enter the meeting date and time, are you multitasking or simply carrying on with your current task? When you are reading an email message and notice that a new message has arrived (but you don’t actually open it and read it) are you multitasking? Scholars of multitasking have offered various definitions of multitasking, but there is no general consensus about exactly what the term means.6
But we don’t actually need an ironclad definition of multitasking for what we are aiming to accomplish here. For what we will be exploring in this chapter is how and why you shift your attention, whether you are moving between two objects in the same application (e.g., between two email messages), between two different applications (between email and Facebook), between two devices (your laptop and your cell phone), or even between online and offline activities (between texting and chatting with a friend face-to-face). How you define a task won’t be as important as seeing when the shifts in your attention are effective and healthy, and when they aren’t.
In investigating multitasking as an attentional practice, we will be exploring three attentional skills that are crucial to it: focusing, noticing, and choosing.
Focusing means directing your attention to the task at hand. When you are reading an email message or posting a message on someone’s Facebook wall, how much attention are you paying to what you’re doing?
Noticing means exercising self-observation or awareness, so you can see that other objects or activities are vying for your attention. When your phone dings, announcing a new text message, how aware are you that this has happened? Do you consciously notice the event, or do you just respond to it out of unconscious habit?
Choosing means making a skillful, informed decision—whether to stay with your current object of focus or to switch to something else—and then reestablishing focus with whichever object you’ve chosen. When do you consciously choose what to attend to next (and on what basis), and when do you operate out of conditioned habit?
One last point before we dive in: I maintain an open mind about the place of multitasking in today’s world. Under the right conditions, multitasking can be quite useful. And under the wrong conditions it can be counterproductive, even deadly. The challenge we face is to understand these conditions, and that’s what I aim to help you do, without finger-wagging or cheerleading.
Overview of the Multitasking Observation Exercise
In the previous observation exercise, I asked you to pay careful attention to your immediate experience, to what you were thinking and feeling, while you were online. You will be doing the same in this exercise, but I will be adding some new elements that are specific to multitasking.
How to Observe Yourself
In the email observation exercise, you observed yourself the old-fashioned way, with your naked senses unaided by observational or recording technologies (other than a pencil and paper or a text editor). This may have been somewhat challenging, especially since we’re not used to paying attention to our body, emotions, and attention while we’re online, or to checking in on our immediate experience at regular intervals. But it is certainly doable, something we can learn and get better at.
. . .
Box 6.1: The Multitasking Observation Exercise
What to do
Engage in multitasking (task switching among several apps and devices), using software to create a record of what you did. Review the recordings, using the information you gather from them to notice your habitual patterns of behavior, what motivates them, and how these patterns affect your effectiveness and well-being.
Why do it?
• To practice (and strengthen) your ability to observe yourself.
• To observe your current ability to focus on your current tasks, to notice other claims on your attention, and to choose to stay with your current task or switch to a different one.
. . .
This kind of self-observation becomes more difficult when we’re multitasking, especially when we’re in the middle of a firestorm of activities and we’re rapidly switching our focus back and forth among them. Fortunately, technology can help. There are a variety of tools that can record the activity on your desktop. Once you’ve obtained one of these (see Step 0 below for the details), you will be able to record yourself multitasking, and then play and replay the video to closely observe your online activity.7
What to Observe
As in the email observation exercise, I will ask you to make use of the mindful check-in (Appendix A) to pay attention to your experience while you’re online. But in addition, I will ask you to notice your multitasking strategy: When do you decide to switch from one task to another and why? On what basis do you choose what to do next?
You may feel that you don’t have a strategy, at least not one that you have consciously constructed. But all of us have certain habitual patterns that determine the way we multitask. Some of us respond to every interruption immediately, while others carefully limit the number of interruptions that can reach us (silencing our phones, for example) and respond selectively to the interruptions that do make it through our protective wall. By observing more closely just what you do, when, and why, you will have the chance to evaluate your current multitasking strategy and to make changes accordingly.
How to Do the Multitasking Observation Exercise
Box 6.2 summarizes the steps in the exercise.
. . .
Box 6.2: The Steps of the Multitasking Observation Exercise
Step 0: Download recording software
Install recording software on your computer and familiarize yourself with it.
Step 1: Perform the primary practice (multitask)
Conduct one or more multitasking sessions, using the recording software to create a video record of each session.
Step 2: Observe what you are doing and feeling
Review the video recordings of your sessions.
Step 3: Log what you are observing
As you replay the recordings, create a written record of what you were doing and how you felt while doing it.
Step 4: Consolidate (summarize) your observations
Review your log, looking for larger patterns. When do you typically switch between tasks and why? When do you refrain from switching and why?
Step 5: Formulate personal guidelines
What do these patterns suggest about how to multitask in healthier and more effective ways?
Step 6: Share and discuss
Talk with others about what you’ve been discovering.
. . .
Step 0: Download recording software
Recording your multitasking sessions will simplify the task of observing yourself. Fortunately, there are a number of software tools available, some of which are free, that will do the trick. Because the technologies are changing so rapidly, I won’t list any particular products or applications here. Instead, I invite you to visit my Web site, where you will find my current recommendations.8
If you choose a recording tool based on your own research, or select one you already have access to, you’ll want a tool that at minimum allows you to record whatever is happening on your desktop, laptop, or mobile screen. In other words, when you replay your recording, you should see a movie in real time of whatever you were doing—opening and closing windows, moving them around on the screen, typing text into various windows, and so on, as well as the movement of your mouse cursor. Your tool should also let you pause the recording and restart it, and skip to other locations, just like you do when you’re watching a movie, or a video clip on YouTube.
In addition, it will be helpful if your recording tool has the following capabilities:
• Saving a recording for later (re-)viewing
• Recording the sounds produced by your computer (for example, the beeps and dings that announce the arrival of new messages)
• Recording ambient sounds in your immediate environment (allowing you to hear your phone ringing or a colleague knocking on the door)
• Recording from your computer’s Web cam (so you can watch your facial expressions and head movements while you are multitasking).
Before you move on to Step 1, you should not only download and install the recording software but also test it. Make a short recording (no more than a couple of minutes) to make sure the software is working properly and you know how to use it—before you begin to record lengthier sessions in the next step.
What if you prefer not to record your multitasking sessions in this way? Here are two alternatives. One, you can observe yourself directly, without any technical assistance, much as you did in the prior observation exercise. You may not get the wealth of detail that’s available from a recording, but you should still be able to make interesting discoveries. Rather than trying to write down observations while you are multitasking (which would add one more task to your set), you might turn on an audio recorder and speak your observations out loud. Two, you can ask a friend, a colleague, or a partner, to observe you while you’re multitasking and take notes. Then, at the end of the session, you can have a conversation with him or her about what happened. All the better if you are both doing the exercise, so you can take turns observing each other.
Step 1: Perform the primary practice (conduct multitasking sessions)
Now that you’ve figured out how to keep track of your multitasking sessions, you should conduct one or more of them, each fifteen to twenty minutes in length or longer. Which sessions should you record? I recommend that you begin with one that’s fairly typical of your multitasking patterns. Find a time of day and a location when you’re fairly certain to be dealing with multiple windows and applications, and perhaps also likely to be interrupted by your phone, by face-to-face contact with others, and so on. If the first session you record turns out to be unusually quiet (with little task switching), then simply try again.
Once you’ve got a fairly typical example, you can decide whether you want to record additional typical examples for comparison, or whether you want to explore the outer edges of your practice (or both). Let’s say your normal pattern involves slow and relatively few task switches. You might choose or create a time when your multitasking will be more intense—faster and more frequent task switches than you normally engage in. Or if you’re normally a pretty intense multitasker, consider creating and recording a much quieter, less dramatic session.
Finally, as you decide which sessions to record, keep the issue of personal privacy in mind. Whether you are using recording software or asking a friend to observe you, your sessions may contain information, about you or others, that is of a sensitive nature. Choose your sessions and your mode of observation carefully, so you don’t violate anyone’s privacy. (And if you do decide to save your recordings, whether locally or on an external server, do your best to store them securely.)
Step 2: Observe what you are doing and feeling (watch the video)
Step 3: Log what you are observing
Once you’ve recorded a session, begin the observation and logging process. Watch the recording immediately, or soon after the initial session. That way, you’ll be able to make use not only of what you are seeing in the recording but also your recent memories of what happened. As in the prior exercises, create a written log where, at minimum, you identify the period of the recording (many recording tools will show you the “time code” for what’s currently being viewed) and take notes about what was happening at that time. (See the sample log template in Appendix B.) Pay particular attention to the following:
• As you watch the video, try to reconstruct your experience (breath, body, emotions, and attention). How did you feel at different points in the session, and what does this suggest to you about your multitasking practice? (If your recording includes video of your face, noticing your facial expressions and head movements may give you useful information about your emotional state. So too may the speed and direction of your cursor movements.)
• Pay special attention to the choice points in your session—those places where something arose that might have led you to switch to some other task. Choice points that arose because of external events will generally be easier to see. (You may be able to hear a ding on the recording when a new message arrived, or see a window change color on the screen.) But you may also be able to reconstruct choice points that arose because of events internal to you. (Perhaps the image from your Web cam shows you looking surprised, or delighted, or unhappy when you begin to read a new message, or perhaps you simply remember how you felt when that message appeared.)
• As you observe these choice points, notice how you responded to them. When did you decide to stay with your current task and when did you decide to switch? Can you reconstruct the basis for your decision?
Here are two examples of people’s log entries, which they wrote while or after viewing their recordings:
Opened up four activities: (1) course homework, (2) Facebook, (3) YouTube (selected a song to play), Phone is also on, volume turned up all the way. I’m also looking at a notebook, because of my homework assignment. I need to basically reflect on the notes I took during a class. (It took me almost two whole minutes to get myself situated and set up for this assignment before I even typed anything out on my homework.)
—Nick
Facebook, paying bills, eating mindlessly. Internally knowing I am being watched with this camera so feeling initially a little on stage. Noticing how many times I touch my glasses, eat—always something in my mouth and if not food then just gum—move my feet around. Facebook still open and lots of folks responding to something I posted earlier but choosing to stick with what I am doing so that I can complete it. I also want to see more of the comments at once instead of spending time rereading and seeing who “likes” it. Impatient while a photo uploads so switch to emails. New class registrant so switch to Excel, address book, then type confirming email. Take care of that task—feels good. Noticing the heat of the computer on my wrists and that my fingers starting to be tense even after a week off from typing. Most of the time I look at the keyboard when I type although sometimes trust that I know where the keys are.
—Christine
Step 4: Consolidate (summarize) your observations
Having logged your multitasking sessions, you are ready to reflect on what you’ve been seeing. Be on the lookout for bottlenecks and obstacles, as well as places where you are operating smoothly and comfortably. How would you characterize your multitasking strategy? On what basis do you shift your attention between tasks, applications, and devices? When does this behavior seem to be productive and healthy, and when less so? How do you keep track of your various tasks, and is there room for improvement?
I suggest you write about the patterns you are discovering. Box 6.3 provides some questions to help you organize your thinking.
Step 5: Formulate personal guidelines
Answering these questions will most likely suggest changes you can make. Formulate these changes as guidelines for future behavior. Some changes may address your inner response to external circumstances and require few or no changes in your outer activities. For example, if you can see that when you’re multi tasking furiously your shoulders are up to your ears, your breathing is shallow, and your brow is furrowed, you could decide in the future to watch out for these signs of stress and to consciously relax your body.
. . .
Box 6.3: Noticing Patterns in Your Multitasking Behavior
1. What did you do?
How many sessions did you observe? For how long? How were the sessions different from one other (e.g., did you multitask normally throughout, did you try some experiments)?
2. In observing breath, body/posture, emotions, and attention, which of these dimensions of your present experience were most salient?
What did they reveal about how you multitask?
3. In the recordings, were you able to notice when new tasks arrived and interruptions occurred (because you heard your cell phone ring or you saw a new email message appear in your inbox)?
How often did you immediately respond to the new task or interruption? On what basis?
4. In the recordings, were you able to notice the times when you did switch to another task or activity?
Why did you switch? (Note: Question 3 asks you to notice the times when you had the potential to switch. This question asks you about the times you actually did.)
5. Putting all this together, how would you characterize your current multitasking strategy?
On what basis do you decide to switch to another task, or to stay with your current task? How do you keep track of your tasks? When is this strategy most effective, and when least?
. . .
Many changes, however, are likely to involve some alteration to your habitual mode of multitasking, to your current strategy. Have you noticed that certain internal states, such as boredom, lead you to start clicking around? Is “clicking around” a satisfying mode of operating for you? What do you want to do about it? If your mood strongly affects whether or not you are multitasking constructively, then perhaps there are times when you shouldn’t engage in multitasking. And if you notice that certain forms of interruption are just too enticing to ignore but generally reduce your effectiveness, then you might consider blocking these out, to the extent you can, or working when these interruptions are less likely to arise.
As you perform this assessment, remember our earlier discussion and be mindful of unhelpful self-criticism. You may well notice behaviors you weren’t previously aware of, some of which are upsetting. While a certain amount of self-judgment may be inevitable, noticing it can help prevent you from fixating on and embellishing it.
Step 6: Share and discuss
By the time we conduct this exercise in class, my students have become quite comfortable with one another and have gotten used to describing and discussing their online practices. Multitasking is such a rich phenomenon that there is a great deal to talk about as they compare and contrast their practices. I suspect you will discover this too when you share your discoveries. But even if you’ve chosen to do this exercise alone, you may just find that you can engage others in lively conversation once you tell them that you’ve recorded yourself multitasking.
What Others Report
Reactions to the Exercise
For some people, this is the first time they’ve paid conscious attention to the way they multitask. For others, it’s a chance to look more closely and reflect more deeply than they’ve done in the past. Some of their written descriptions are quite lovely—evocative and rich in detail. Here is how Max, who works for a large tech company, describes a period of multitasking he engaged in one morning:
I go through around a hundred new tweets in Twitteriffic, clicking on links occasionally and either reading something in the browser or adding it to my Instapaper queue to read later. I check up on Facebook and LinkedIn. I look at woot.com to see if today’s deal includes a handsome, cheap TV stand, which I’ve been hoping to discover for months now. No luck. I read a bunch of new RSS posts in NetNewsWire, which takes me back to the browser three times. All these activities are interspersed, not discrete—I’m switching between them for no obvious reason. Coffee has that effect on me. . . . I thought I was going to be cool with sharing these videos but just watching it myself makes me uncomfortable, so I delete it.
(Max’s last remark is a reference to the recording he’d made of the session. Watching it made him uncomfortable, so he decided against sharing it with other participants in the course.)
Some people can see that they like multitasking and are actually quite good at it. But even these people generally find that there’s more for them to learn and improve. Others, however, don’t feel nearly so good about their multitasking habits. “I am on Facebook, clicking from link to link for no reason,” Sophie, a doctoral student, says. “I really felt stupid,” she adds, “when I was watching myself checking Facebook three times in thirty minutes and nothing was changing, the feed was exactly the same.” And Christine, a business coach, is shocked to see herself switching gears in the middle of typing a word. Even more dramatically, a graduate student named Alex has a real wakeup call when he sees himself on the video posting something on Facebook, but has no memory of having done so. “The scary part was,” he says, “I watched the recording not ten minutes after doing the exercise and I couldn’t remember anything about what I had written on [my cousin’s] wall! Even seeing it, I didn’t remember writing it.”
Noticing Qualities of Body and Mind
As in the email observation exercise, people discover that their present experience—their breath, their body, their emotions, and the quality of their attention—carries valuable information about their online behavior. Kim, a part-time university instructor, comments on her breathing: “In terms of bodily feelings, I can practically see myself holding my breath. There are a few points of long sighs—a chance to exhale, finally. Even my tendency to look to the side when I ‘have to think’ seems an awful lot like someone trying to find a way to breathe.” By observing herself in the video, Millie, a graduate student doing health research, notices various signs of physical discomfort she was previously unaware of: holding her shoulder in a tilted, uncomfortable position and clutching her neck at times.
Some people notice that they aren’t very focused while they are multitasking. “I notice my attention, or lack of attention,” Kathleen says, “while doing multiple tasks. In my observation notes I use the word ‘haphazard’ a couple of times, indicating that . . . my attention is not fully focused on what I am doing at the time.” Similarly Martin, who works at a large tech company, notices “the amount of time wasted doing essentially nothing.” “I always feel like I am scrambling for time,” he concludes, “yet I see where it can be easily recovered.”
People also regularly take note of the strong emotions that arise while multitasking. Words like “boredom,” “anxiety,” “restlessness” are commonly invoked. These are discussed further in the next section, where people talk about how strong emotions motivate them to switch tasks.
To Switch or Not to Switch
The heart of the exercise is exploring when we switch tasks and why. Some switches are of course unavoidable, because a task has ended and we need to move on to something else, or because we can’t make further progress on it until a new piece of information has arrived. These necessary switches aren’t nearly as interesting as the optional or discretionary switches, when we’re choosing to switch.
It is fairly easy to see how external conditions often lead us to switch tasks. When your cell phone is ringing, it can be hard to resist the temptation to answer it—or at least to notice who is calling and to make a decision based on that knowledge. It can be even harder to ignore someone talking to you in person. To varying degrees, the indicators (beeps, visual markers, etc.) that signal the arrival of a new message can also be hard to resist. Many people watching the recording of their own multitasking see the power of external interruptions to take them away from whatever they were doing at that moment.
Probably the biggest discovery people make, though, is the extent to which internal conditions—thoughts, feelings, and especially strong emotions—lead them to switch tasks, often unconsciously. They notice that task switching can be a way of avoiding what they are currently doing, a form of procrastination.
Some people also see what it was about their current tasks, or their current circumstances, that they’re trying to avoid. Anxiety and boredom are often mentioned as triggers. Jonathan speaks for many people when he says, “I’ll sometimes pathologically refresh inboxes and watchlists, checking to see if anything new has come in over the past thirty seconds. This is really just an indication that I’m bored. . . . It is time I could make much better use of by doing anything else in the world.”
Seeing One’s Overall Multitasking Strategy
By observing when they switch and why (and equally important, when they don’t switch, even though they could), people are able to piece together their personal multitasking strategies—their regular habits that have emerged over years of time spent online.
Some people are minimalist multitaskers: they don’t tend to switch tasks often, preferring to stay focused on what they’re doing for long stretches of time. For them, this exercise can be exasperating, because they feel they’re being asked to do something they have no inclination to do. Says Erin: “I don’t think I really even understand how other people actually do multitask. . . . Maybe I am missing out on ways that I could incorporate some multitasking into my working habits. On the other hand, if it isn’t broken, why fix it? . . . I’ve spent [many] years as a classical musician working on my focus and attention and perhaps this is just the way I am at this point.”
Others are maximalists, tending to switch quickly and often. This may mean responding to every interruption as it occurs, in a highly reactive way. Michael, a freelance writer, decides that his standard strategy is “pretty scattershot.” It involves “jumping around and looking at a bunch of different things and responding to messages, texts, and calls almost immediately when they come in.”
Most of us, I suspect, are neither strict minimalists nor maximalists, but find ourselves somewhere in between. Some people notice that they have different multitasking strategies depending on a variety of conditions, including the task they are doing, their current location, or the mood they’re in. “There are two ways in which I interact with multi tasking,” Lydia says. “One is when I am focused. This occurs when I am present mentally, and in a mood to work. In this mode, I am capable of multitasking quickly and efficiently.” But when she is in the wrong mood, multitasking is a kind of flailing, “which is equivalent to pissing in the wind—trying to do something there is no hope of succeeding with.”
Others distinguish multitasking sessions in which their main aim is to accomplish one or more tasks, to be productive, and those in which they’re simply wanting to relax, to be entertained. Will comments: “In a session where I wasn’t trying to accomplish a certain task . . . there was less stress involved and it was more enjoyable. I could switch back and forth from Facebook to reading an article to answering the phone without it being a big deal. I was in no rush and I was free to impulsively do what I wanted and frequently did. . . . It was actually pretty relaxing and I didn’t feel like I was ‘multitasking’ although I kind of was, flipping from one thing to another.” And in a similar vein, Max notes: “I noticed in this exercise . . . that I do two kinds of multitasking. Sometimes I’ll work my way down a to-do list getting things done and getting distracted along the way. Sometimes I’ll use the Internet as a deliberate time sink, letting myself flit back and forth between sources of text . . . and skimming diverse information as a means of staying informed.”
Establishing Guidelines
From these kinds of observations, people are able to see the richness and complexity of their multitasking behavior. And often, just seeing behaviors they consider counterproductive is enough to suggest changes they might make. Since multitasking is about choice, about deciding what to do next, many of people’s guidelines address this directly.
As in the focused email exercise, people discover the importance of establishing their intention—what are they trying to accomplish?—as a means of staying focused on what’s most important. A technology designer named Henry writes a guideline that reads: “Work on setting out a series of tasks I want to do when I sit down at the computer. . . . Write these things down so I can keep track of what I’m working on now, whether it’s in the list of set-out tasks, and whether or not I’m working on too many things at once.”
This is an important first step, but what happens when the phone starts ringing, the itch to check Facebook arises, or the email begins to visibly pile up? Having seen how easy it is to respond unconsciously to such triggers, some people realize that they need to become aware of potential choice points, right at the moment they arise, and make skillful decisions about switching in the heat of the moment. Danielle, a master’s student, does a lovely job of articulating both the challenge of staying focused and her proposed solution: “Often I will have a general or loose goal in my multitasking that directs my actions and switching. I feel like this works really well in most cases but sometimes does not. Where this falls apart . . . is when my attention gets ‘hijacked’ by a strong emotional response to something I see or read. I feel this might be solved by putting a space between that reaction and my response. Then, I can make an informed decision if I want to react to it then, later, not at all, or put off that decision.” Her personal guidelines read:
If I notice that I want to switch tasks due to a strong emotional response, take a moment to pause before switching, then reassess if I should switch or not.
If I notice I am becoming impatient, try various ways to defuse that impatience before I start switching aimlessly. Take a moment to pause and reassess what my intention is.
If I notice that my attention is becoming diffuse, take a moment to focus on breathing, then reassess what my intention is and what I would like it to be. One way to do this would be to ask myself a series of questions: What am I trying to do? What would I like to do? Have I answered the question(s) I was trying to answer? Should I move on?
Final Reflections
When Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony Wagner published the results of their multitasking study in 2009, they made headline news. They had recruited Stanford undergraduates, selecting fifty students who multitasked a great deal and fifty who didn’t, and had given all one hundred of them a series of low-level attention tests. Their main findings were that the heavy multitaskers were worse at ignoring distractions than the light multitaskers, their memory while multitasking was worse, and they switched tasks more slowly.9
The sound-bite summary for these results was obvious: heavy multitaskers perform worse than light multitaskers! And it raised an important question that still hasn’t been adequately answered: Do people multitask more heavily because they are unable to ignore distractions (and hence are compelled to switch tasks when they are interrupted)? Or does heavy multitasking cause people to become more distractible? Eyal Ophir seems to favor the second interpretation. In a 2011 interview he said: “Over time you may be training yourself not to focus. You teach yourself that something more exciting might be just around the corner—behind that notification, or the app on your mobile phone, or the email you haven’t checked. If you prioritize the unknown, but potentially exciting, over what’s in front of you, you’ll have a hard time controlling your own focus. You may transition from a top-down model of attention allocation, where you decide what to focus on, to a bottom-up model, where any new notification or alert will dictate what you focus on.”10
My guess is that both positions are likely to be true. What Ophir is suggesting sounds quite plausible. If you continually chase the latest internal or external interruption, you are missing the opportunity to strengthen your attention by bringing it back to your current task focus, “again and again.” Instead, you are training yourself to pursue the latest shiny new thing that comes along, moment by moment. But it seems equally likely that if you don’t have the attentional strength to avoid distractions—to notice them and bring your attention back to your original object of focus—then you will be pulled along by interruptions as they continually arise.
All this makes it sound like heavy multitasking is necessarily problematic. Yet in the same interview, Ophir reacts to the interviewer’s suggestion that heavy multitaskers are actually less effective at multitasking. “I think heavy multitaskers are not less effective,” he says, “they simply have a different goal. A different set of priorities. Where you might say traditionally we value the ability to focus through distractions, they are willing to sacrifice focus in order to make sure they don’t miss an unexpected, but rewarding, surprise. As a result, they might do worse in the office scenario I described, but they might also be the first to slam on the brakes in the car/mobile phone scenario. So who is more effective?”
The central question in all of this, for me at least, is what constitutes effective behavior. When and how should we multitask, and when should we abstain? Answering this question will surely depend on understanding our current intentions or goals and matching our behavior (our strategy) to those intentions. So rather than thinking of multitasking as good or bad, we might describe it as skillful or unskillful, as effective or ineffective, as healthy or not. And doing this means looking at the behavior in its actual context—in other words, really paying attention.