Focused Multitasking
I learned that there really is a way to be an efficient, mindful and productive multitasker! . . . By setting manageable intentions before I engage in multitasking, I’m able to be kind to myself while also setting a goal. This creates a place where I am better able to focus on the tasks. By taking deep breaths, I remind myself of my intention and am able to kindly refocus and bring myself back to the task.
—Kathleen
I’m still not a big fan of multitasking and I don’t think that I will be engaging in a high-activity form of it with regularity. That said, the principles that I established for myself in this exercise have made the experience less frustrating. I certainly plan to adopt these strategies when I am in environments that force a degree of multitasking . . . or for times when I have a lot to accomplish and need to maintain my priorities.
—Samantha
I learned a great deal from Darlene Cohen about how to multitask in a more focused way. Darlene was a Bay Area Zen teacher, who for many years taught workshops on managing chronic illness and stress. During the dot-com boom in the late 1990s, tech workers came to her, asking her to help them work more productively and less stressfully. She began teaching workshops on “connecting with work in a deeply satisfying way,” which is the subtitle of the book she eventually published on the subject, The One Who Is Not Busy. I discovered Darlene’s work through this book, and quickly saw its relevance to my own research and teaching. In her workshops and her book she explored how we might work more effectively by training our attention and learning to shift our focus more fluidly. While reading her book, I saw the possibility of providing some experimental validation for these ideas.1
I contacted Darlene and explained my idea: to offer knowledge workers her training program, and to evaluate their ability to multitask both before and after the training. Darlene, it turned out, had a master’s degree in neuroscience and had worked as an assistant in the Harvard laboratory of the psychologist B. F. Skinner. She was intrigued by the idea for the study and was interested in participating. With funding from the National Science Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, and in collaboration with Jacob O. Wobbrock (a human-computer interaction researcher at the University of Washington Information School), Alfred Kaszniak (a neuropsychologist at the University of Arizona), and Marilyn Ostergren (a doctoral student at the UW Information School), I was able to recruit human resource managers from Seattle and San Francisco, train them, and test their multitasking ability.
Some of the human resource managers were trained by Darlene herself, or by one of her senior students. They received eight weeks of instruction in attention training. A second group received eight weeks of instruction in body relaxation. The third group, the waitlist control group, received no training for the initial eight-week period but was subsequently given attention training and tested again. We tested all the participants’ multitasking ability, both before and after the eight-week period, putting them in an office with a laptop and a phone, and asking them to complete a series of typical office tasks, such as scheduling a meeting, finding a conference room, and writing a memo. The information they needed came via email and instant messaging, as well as documents available on paper and on their laptops. To complete the tasks in the short amount of time we gave them, they would have to multitask—answering the phone, responding to knocks on the door, and deciding when to read and answer the email and instant messages that were continually arriving. It was meant to be highly stressful, and for most participants it was.
When we analyzed the participants’ tests, we found no differences across the groups in the accuracy of their results or in the amount of time they took. But other measures indicated that attention training had positively affected people’s multitasking behavior. Those given eight weeks of attention training were less stressed, they had better memory for the work they had been doing, and they were less fragmented in their work, switching tasks less often and spending more time on their primary tasks. This last result is especially intriguing. Why would those given attention training have switched tasks less often? My guess is because they could: because with a stronger attention muscle, they could make conscious decisions about when it made sense to switch to interrupting tasks (such as a new email or instant message), and when they were better off staying with their current tasks.2
In addition to offering some experimental confirmation that attention training can positively affect multitasking, the study helped me formulate the two multitasking exercises I present in this book, in the previous chapter and in this one. To evaluate the study participants’ multitasking abilities, we recorded their behavior and later asked human coders (undergraduates who were members of our research team) to watch the video recordings and to flag critical points in the recordings, such as when interruptions happened and when participants switched to different tasks. This led me to ask students in my course to record themselves and to observe themselves, thereby acting both as experimental subjects and as experimenting observers. In watching the recordings of the participants in our study, I was able to see, close up, the choices that people were making to shift their attention to an interruption or to stay focused on their current task. This gave me a better understanding of the attentional work that Darlene was talking about. And it helped me to formulate the exercise on focused multitasking, which is the subject of this chapter.
Overview of the Focused Multitasking Exercise
In the focused email exercise, I asked you to keep returning to your email whenever you were distracted. You might notice triggers that tempted you to go elsewhere—external triggers like your phone ringing, or internal triggers like boredom or anxiety. But in the face of these distractors, whether you simply noticed them or gave in to them (and found yourself on Facebook or Instagram), your assignment was to return to email. Again and again.
The focused multitasking exercise, of course, is different. Here the challenge isn’t simply to stay focused on a single task. (If it were, you wouldn’t be multitasking.) The challenge in multitasking is deciding when to switch, and when not to. It is about making skillful choices. But in order to make a skillful choice, you have to realize that you have a choice. What makes this particularly challenging, as we saw in the last chapter, is that some of our switching behavior is habitual and unconscious. We’ve gone to Facebook—or to Pinterest, or YouTube, or the New York Times, or to our ringing phone—before we’re even aware of the enticement these alternatives offer.
In observing their own multitasking in the previous exercise, some people begin to see the possibility of operating in a more focused and intentional way. Here Henry can clearly see not only the problem (for him), but the solution: “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. . . . I would like to become more mindful of these distractions . . . and either ignore them or address them briefly and consciously before returning to my original task.” And Will notes that “multitasking seems to become unpleasant when we kind of lose control of that decision-making ability. I certainly noticed that when I was able to decide what I wanted to do and was able to act on it there was a sense of freedom and less stress.”
So the focused multitasking exercise asks us to become more conscious of the attentional choices that are arising, and to make conscious decisions about how to respond to them. This means not only observing three attentional skills—focusing, noticing, and choosing—but practicing and strengthening them. When we’re engaged with a task, we attempt to bring our full attention to it. When interruptions arise, we pause and notice them. And then, based on what is in our best interest, we make a choice—to switch or to stay with our current task—bringing our full attention to whatever we’ve chosen to focus on next.
In the focused multitasking exercise, you will have a chance to practice these skills. And I do mean practice. Few of us are able to consistently achieve this degree of attention. The challenge here isn’t so much to “get it right” as to exercise certain skills, learning from the experience, keeping in mind that the more you practice the better you will become.
. . .
Box 7.1: The Focused Multitasking Exercise
What to do
Engage in multitasking (task switching among several apps and devices). Focus on your current task, noticing triggers tempting you to switch, and skillfully choose whether to remain with your current task or to switch to another.
Why do it?
• To practice (and strengthen) your ability to notice when you are tempted to switch tasks (and why).
• To resist automatically/unconsciously switching tasks.
• To practice (and strengthen) your ability to choose when to switch and why.
. . .
How to Do the Focused Multitasking Exercise
Box 7.2 summarizes the six steps in the exercise. Let’s work through each of them in turn.
Step 0: Decide how you will observe and log
In the multitasking observation exercise, I asked you to download, install, and use software to record your multitasking activity. I recommend that you do this again. But now that you’ve had some experience with this method, you’re in a position to see how useful a second set of recordings is likely to be. So I leave it up to you to decide whether to repeat the process or, as in the earlier exercises, to log your observations on your own, either during or immediately following the exercise.
Step 1: Perform the primary practice (multitask mindfully)
Conduct one or more sessions online, choosing times of day and locations where you can expect the quality and kind of interaction and interruptions that you’re wanting to investigate. Do you want to explore your multitasking ability when you’re in a firestorm of activity, with phones ringing, face-to-face interruptions, your Twitter feed open, and lots of texting? Or do you prefer a quieter and slower pace of activity with a smaller number of potential interruptions?
. . .
Box 7.2: The Steps of the Focused Multitasking Exercise
Step 0: Decide how you will observe and log
Will you use the recording software from the previous exercise or not?
Step 1: Perform the primary practice (multitask mindfully)
Focus on whatever task you are currently doing, noticing triggers to switch, and skillfully choosing whether to remain with your current task or to shift to another.
Step 2: Observe what you are doing and feeling
Notice how well you are able to make conscious choices. When do you lose awareness and why?
Step 3: Log what you are observing
Create a written record of what you have been observing.
Step 4: Consolidate (summarize) your observations
Review your log, looking for larger patterns. What helps you stay focused? What typically tempts you to stray?
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.
. . .
Let me suggest that you conduct at least two sessions, and that you vary the multitasking strategy in each. In one session you might try a maximalist strategy (where you switch often). In another you might try a minimalist strategy (where you try to keep your switching to a minimum). If you decide to conduct more than one multitasking session, I suggest that you try a different strategy in one of them than you normally do. In particular, if you tend to be a maximalist, try being more of minimalist and see whether you are capable of resisting the urge to switch. And if you tend toward minimalism, try stretching toward maximalism. Pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone may well teach you more about your current habits and preferences, and suggest new possibilities for your online behavior.
Step 2: Observe what you are doing and feeling
Step 3: Log what you are observing
How you handle these two steps will depend on the decision you made in Step 0 (whether or not you decided to use the recording software). If you are using the software, then you will again log your observations while you are watching the video recording of your session. And if not, you will need to log your observations either while you are multitasking or immediately afterward.
In either case, you should pay particular attention to the choices you made during the session: to switch or not to switch? When were you making conscious choices and when not? To what extent were you able to stick with your strategy (maximalist, minimalist, or somewhere in between)?
Here are two examples from student logs:
I start reading, but note right away I am cold (external trigger). I acknowledge this and oblige it because it will affect my concentration. I return, but first light a candle, then see an old one that I want to throw away. This was totally mindless action. Thankfully, I was still on task and returned to reading immediately. iTunes icon starts bouncing on desktop. It takes me roughly thirty seconds to notice it (external trigger) and I respond immediately to it. I check the voracity of the task it wants me to complete (updating credit card information) and dismiss it. If it had been shorter/easier, I probably would have responded.
—Martin
Simultaneous gchats make my attention shift back and forth between email and conversations. Once the chat reaches a natural pause, I’m presented with the opportunity to decide whether to return to my original task or switch to a new one. As per usual, I open many emails, click on relevant links, and once I have a series of tabs lined up, I begin to read through them.
—Eric
Step 4: Consolidate (summarize) your observations
Now read through your log in search of larger patterns. Were there times when it was easier to remain aware and make skillful choices? What conditions helped you to do so—changes to your breathing, to your posture, to your attitude? When did your mind tend to wander? Which triggers, internal or external, tended to exert the most influence on you? Which ones were easy to surmount and which ones were almost impossible to resist? Did you notice any change in your response to triggers as you conducted more sessions?
Write about the patterns you have been discovering. Box 7.3 presents a series of questions that may help guide your writing.
Step 5: Formulate personal guidelines
What have you learned from this exercise that you can now put into effect? Have you discovered that a particular multitasking strategy is most satisfying for you? Are there times when you are better off not multitasking? What can you do to respond to triggers more skillfully?
Step 6: Share and discuss
This is a very challenging exercise. Aren’t you curious to discover how others dealt with it?
What Others Report
Reactions to the Exercise
Yes, this is a hard exercise to do well, if this means never (or even rarely) switching tasks unconsciously. Still, some people discover benefits in multitasking in this way (more about this next), and those who set the bar low (sometimes being able to catch triggers and respond mindfully) seem more likely to express a degree of satisfaction.
. . .
Box 7.3: Noticing Patterns in the Focused Multitasking Exercise
1. What did you do?
How many sessions did you conduct? For how long? How were the sessions different from one other (e.g., did you multitask normally throughout, did you experiment with mimimalist or maximalist strategies)?
2. Overall, what was your experience of the exercise?
How successful were you in remaining focused? Were you able to notice choice points, pause, reflect, and make skillful choices? Were internal or external triggers easier to notice and deal with?
3. What helped you stay focused?
What conditions, either internal or external, helped you to notice triggers and to make skillful choices?
4. If you practiced more than one multitasking strategy, what did you learn from the differences between them?
5. Do you intend to adopt this method of focused multitasking in the future?
Why or why not? Would you consider at least adopting it at times?
6. Summarize what you learned from the exercise
Whether or not you intend to adopt this strategy, what did you learn that will help you multitask in the future—or help you decide when to multitask and when not to?
. . .
Some people actually change their attitude about multitasking, either about its value as a cultural practice or about their own ability to do it. “I’m still not a big fan of multitasking,” says Samantha, who is completing a degree in information science, but “I plan to adopt these strategies when I am in environments that force a degree of multitasking.” And Sandy, now working in the legal field, concludes that “task switching isn’t always a bad thing,” and “doesn’t have to be a sign of procrastinating or being a stereotypical ‘millennial.’”
Discovering the Benefits
What do people find helpful about this method of multitasking? I most often hear three benefits mentioned: a sense of increased productivity, reduced time, and a lessening of stress. These seem likely to be related. I noted in Chapter 3 that task switching involves “switch costs.” It takes time to let go of one task and move on to another, so the more frequently we switch, the more time is spent in the process of switching and the less in attending to our tasks. This can easily affect productivity. But by being more conscious and intentional about when they switch, people may decide to switch less often. Indeed, if you can see that your desire to switch is motivated by anxiety or boredom, or that it’s a form of procrastination, you may be more likely to stay with your current task.
It also seems likely that operating in a more focused, less distracted, way is less stressful. Here, for example, Stephanie makes a connection between productivity and stress: “I felt more productive and less stressed about distractions when I was mindful of them. I felt less overwhelmed, even when a distraction came up that had to be dealt with. I found it easy to return to where I was prior to the distraction.” The participants in the multitasking experiment I conducted with Darlene Cohen expressed similar sentiments. Asked how their multitasking behavior was different after their eight weeks of attention training, some of them talked about feeling calmer and in greater control. On the test after her training, one human resources manager said, “I was more calm. I was able to see things coming up and not attend to them, if they weren’t urgent.” Another said that on the second go-round, “I wasn’t stressed. . . . I was calm about it and did one thing at a time. It was much more manageable.” And a third commented: “I feel like I’m in more control, so I’m better able to manage. I’m calmer, more present, so my mind isn’t going away anymore.”3
Noticing and Dealing with Distractions
One of the explicit objectives in the multitasking observation exercise was to notice triggers or potential distractions and to observe how you typically respond to them. So it might seem that by the time people approach the focused multitasking exercise, there is nothing more to learn about distractions. But this turns out not the case. Indeed as Millie observes: “I learned a lot about my triggers in this exercise. This seemed counterintuitive to me at first, as the multitasking observation sessions seemed like the likelier place to observe my triggers. However, mindfully staying with the trigger instead of immediately [responding] to it gave me a chance to more deeply understand both the trigger source and my reaction to it.”
By “mindfully staying with the trigger,” people get a sense of their habitual responses to different events. Initially overwhelmed by the topic she was investigating, Emily says, “I went straight back to my inbox. . . . When I don’t know what to do next, I am triggered to distract myself.” “I notice I’ll switch tabs when something is taking too long (i.e., more than a second, haha) to load,” says Gary. And Stephanie notices how just one seemingly small move away from her current task can lead to a whole cascade of mindless clicking: “I got sucked into an email about an upcoming conference because it seemed highly relevant and was of definite interest. Sure enough, I caught myself following links and shifting into mindless clicking instead of staying focused. . . . It was almost as if allowing myself to drift for that little bit brought up thoughts of drifting more.”
Of course, not all interruptions are simply to be ignored. The central challenge in the exercise is to make skillful choices. Says Emily: “I believe I was successful, for the most part, in deciding when to switch over to the new tasks that came in via email. I really had a sort of conversation with myself about the time it would take to switch, versus the time it would take for me to jot down a reminder to act later.” And Michael observes that he did “take note of when a new email, text, or Facebook message came through, and I would recognize it and decide to check it, as opposed to the natural impulse of checking it without any prior consideration.” In this way, he “recognized when something came up and made a conscious choice of whether to check it or not.”
Not everyone, however, reports this degree of success. Henry describes his tendency to cascade from one diversion to another:
I was often able to notice choice points (though not always), but usually the impulse to do them was too strong to fully resist. I would like to practice at this to get a bit better at pausing before taking these actions to [decide] whether or not I really want to go, say, check email or Facebook (or Twitter or Reddit, if I’m really putting off work). Often I think the problem with this is that I convince myself that the little diversion will be a quick one—“Just go check the Facebook notifications, tick them off, and get to work,” I’ll say—but then I’ll see an article that looks interesting, and click it . . . and then I’ll read the article, and maybe it’ll remind me of something else, and then I’ll send an email, and then. . . . And sometime later, I’ll come back to my original point of focus.
Strategies for Staying Focused
What helps us to remain focused, and to resist the various temptations and distractions that we ourselves may regard as unhelpful? I noted in Chapter 5 that people regularly describe four strategies for staying focused: establishing their intentions, returning awareness to the breath and body, slowing down, and establishing boundaries. People mention these same strategies when they’ve performed the focused multitasking exercise (Box 7.4).
But there is another strategy people describe after doing the focused multitasking exercise, one that isn’t discussed in the earlier exercise. In focused email, the instructions are quite prescriptive and unambiguous: whenever you notice your attention wandering from email, bring it back. In the multitasking exercise, there is a great deal more latitude: you have to decide when to switch and when to stay with your current task. Different strategies are possible, including the minimalist and maximalist forms I mentioned above. This raises the question, which strategies are most effective for you, and when?
. . .
Box 7.4: Strategies for Staying Focused
1. Establish and monitor your intention
2. Use breath and body awareness to focus and relax
3. Slow down
4. Establish physical and temporal boundaries
5. Choose an effective multitasking strategy
. . .
Some people discover that staying toward the minimalist end (less frequent switching) helps them stay focused. “During my maximalist session,” says Eric, an undergraduate studying information science, “I found that I more frequently lost my alertness and ended up checking other tabs without realizing what I was doing. . . . While engaging in my minimalist session, I was much more focused, felt more accomplished, and was able to recognize many triggers.”
But some people discover that it is valuable to choose a strategy based on their current circumstances. Thus Morgan observes:
Being honest with myself up front about what needs to get done (or doesn’t) at a particular work session is really important. Once I’ve decided if it’s okay to multitask or that I need to focus mostly on one task at a time to completion, I quickly settle into that mode of working, and distractions are dealt with much more easily. In the former situation, I’m extremely focused, and no amount of inbox numbers running up can distract me until I’m done with the task at hand. In the latter, I still get things done but don’t feel bad about the occasional Pinterest jaunt or email switchover in between the actual work. It’s nice to know that I’m capable of both of these styles and I think they’ll be really helpful in the future.
Final Reflections
When I first conceived of the multitasking experiment, I described it to a friend, who counseled me not to undertake it. She was concerned that training people to be better multitaskers—at the extreme, training people to become more efficient, machinelike workers—might just feed today’s mania for going ever faster and producing ever more, health and well-being be damned. Shouldn’t we multitask less, she was suggesting, not better? (Indeed, after the study was published and received press attention, some people expressed criticism of exactly this kind.)
To be honest, I had some of these same concerns—and my friend knew it. But I felt then, and feel even more strongly now, that the training in focused multitasking is meant to increase our options, to increase our freedom to choose what is skillful and healthy. As we saw in Chapter 5, some people find freedom in focusing exclusively on a single task or app. Emily, for example, said that focusing on one thing was less stressful than panicking about fifty. She thus came to see that not multitasking was a real option, and that it worked for her.
But I doubt that Emily was suggesting she would never multitask again. There are times when many of us will find ourselves multitasking, either because we have unconsciously entered into it or because we chose to do so. And the focused multitasking exercise suggests that it is possible to multitask in a calmer and more focused way. Discovering that we can shift our focus with greater awareness and skill thus gives us more options. We have the freedom to choose to multitask, or not, depending on the circumstances. I see from student responses that they generally understand this (as the quotation above from Morgan makes clear).
What’s more, whether or not we choose to practice focused multitasking, the skills involved are general life skills—they will help us to craft a better life. For we are continually shifting our attention from one object of focus to another. And the character and quality of our lives is in large measure determined by the choices we are constantly making about what to attend to next and what to do about it. Learning to observe this behavior, to make it more conscious, and to make skillful choices can therefore help us stay focused when it really matters, and to shift our attention when it is appropriate. The lesson is simple conceptually, even as it takes much practice to learn. As Erin puts it in one of her personal guidelines: “Be mindful and make your decisions—don’t let your decisions make you.”