It’s always irritated me when I’m sitting on the phone to have someone come up to me and just start talking, showing me papers, demanding my attention. I’m already using it. I apologize to the caller, look the person standing in front of me straight in the eye and say, “do you not see that I’m on the phone?” That’s when I get the smack, as they reply, “and you can’t chew gum and walk at the same time?”
We’ve become a world that applauds the multi-tasker, the superhuman who can talk on the cellphone, holding a vente mocha frapucino in the same hand as the mascara brush, while maneuvering a 2 ton behemoth through a slalom course surrounded by young children on bicycles with little fringy things emanating from their handlebar grips. Not only could they do all these tasks at once, but they could do them as well, if not better, than the rest of us. These are our heroes.
According to a study by researchers at Stanford University, whose purpose was to determine what made these heroes so different, so much better, than us mere mortals who were required to focus, one task at a time, it’s all a lie. From the New York Times :
We’ve become a world that applauds the multi-tasker, the superhuman who can talk on the cellphone, holding a vente mocha frapucino in the same hand as the mascara brush, while maneuvering a 2 ton behemoth through a slalom course surrounded by young children on bicycles with little fringy things emanating from their handlebar grips. Not only could they do all these tasks at once, but they could do them as well, if not better, than the rest of us. These are our heroes.
According to a study by researchers at Stanford University, whose purpose was to determine what made these heroes so different, so much better, than us mere mortals who were required to focus, one task at a time, it’s all a lie. From the New York Times :
Last week, researchers at Stanford University published a study showing that the most persistent multitaskers perform badly in a variety of tasks. They don’t focus as well as non-multitaskers. They’re more distractible. They’re weaker at shifting from one task to another and at organizing information. They are, as a matter of fact, worse at multitasking than people who don’t ordinarily multitask.“Multitaskers were just lousy at everything,” said Clifford I. Nass, a professor of communication at Stanford and one of the study’s investigators. “It was a complete and total shock to me.”
Initially suspecting that multitaskers possessed some rare and enviable qualities that helped them process simultaneous channels of information, Professor Nass had been “in awe of them,” he said, acknowledging that he himself is “dreadful” at multitasking. “I was sure they had some secret ability. But it turns out that high multitaskers are suckers for irrelevancy.”
I’ve always had the ability to switch gears very quickly, moving from case to case, from serious to light-hearted. But I tend to focus on the task at hand with great intensity. When I write, I hear nothing. If I’m interrupted, you can see it in my writing, where there’s an obvious (to me at least) break in the thought process as exposed by the words. It was a regular source of ridicule around my household, there everyone from the kids to the gardener (usually at the kids’ goading) would make fun of me for being a unitasker. Vindication!
It’s not productive to do many things poorly. Good enough isn’t good enough. No one salutes the latte drinking, cellphone chatting driver who only ran down one kid because he managed to miss five others.
And as for the Slackoisie, who maintain that they can write a brief whilst listening to their Ipod with The Soup blaring on the tube, your work isn’t as brilliant as you think. If your boss says it is, then perhaps your boss isn’t any better at it than you are. Your self-assessment that you’re doing just fine, actually quite wonderfully, is a product of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, not strength of intellect.
One off-shoot of this study is the confirmation that we cannot validly assess our own performance. The constant bombardment of people claiming how wonderful they are, how great they’re doing, how critics of their ways are just so terribly wrong, because they think they’re doing fine, is full of it. It’s time to cut the crap that enablers (and promoters) use to surround incompetence with the imbued benefit of wondrous glory. It’s still incompetence, no matter how many flourishes to make it seem uplifting.
The moral of the story is that while you might be able to do seven things at the same time, you can’t do them well. Maybe the next time our cutting edge visionaries decide on what color is the new black, or where next years hemlines should be, competence, attention to detail, and focusing on one thing and doing it right will be back in style.
“The core of the problem,” Professor Nass said, is that the multitaskers “think they’re great at what they do; and they’ve convinced everybody else they’re good at it, too.”It’s not merely that multitaskers appear to be so much more capable to those of us who require focus to perform a task well, but that they appeared to be able to get so many things done while we were busily trying to complete one stinky little task. They are deluding themselves. I’ve had too many occasions to challenge the value and quality of work performed by multitaskers, finding it consistently lacking in detail and depth. I’m told that it may not be perfect (duh) but that’s the giveback for being so productive.
It’s not productive to do many things poorly. Good enough isn’t good enough. No one salutes the latte drinking, cellphone chatting driver who only ran down one kid because he managed to miss five others.
And as for the Slackoisie, who maintain that they can write a brief whilst listening to their Ipod with The Soup blaring on the tube, your work isn’t as brilliant as you think. If your boss says it is, then perhaps your boss isn’t any better at it than you are. Your self-assessment that you’re doing just fine, actually quite wonderfully, is a product of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, not strength of intellect.
One off-shoot of this study is the confirmation that we cannot validly assess our own performance. The constant bombardment of people claiming how wonderful they are, how great they’re doing, how critics of their ways are just so terribly wrong, because they think they’re doing fine, is full of it. It’s time to cut the crap that enablers (and promoters) use to surround incompetence with the imbued benefit of wondrous glory. It’s still incompetence, no matter how many flourishes to make it seem uplifting.
The moral of the story is that while you might be able to do seven things at the same time, you can’t do them well. Maybe the next time our cutting edge visionaries decide on what color is the new black, or where next years hemlines should be, competence, attention to detail, and focusing on one thing and doing it right will be back in style.
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Here’s another exploding myth to add to your collection:
When your kids or students “explain” why they haven’t started a big project by saying that “they work best under pressure” (what I call the “10 pm Sunday Night Syndrome), tell them that some research shows that kids who wait until the last minute to start big projects do not fare as well in college when there are many more demands.