Don't these people even know the basics that multitasking does not exist.
Multitasking is exhausting your brain, say neuroscientists
Does your morning routine consist of checking emails, browsing
Facebook, downing coffee, heading to the train while Googling one last
idea, checking notifications, more coffee, and going through your work
email? The very myriad of activities crammed into your morning, and the
constant switching between them, is likely making you very tired.
When we attempt to multitask, we don’t actually do more than one
activity at once, but quickly switch between them. And this switching is
exhausting. It uses up oxygenated glucose in the brain, running down
the same fuel that’s needed to focus on a task.
“That switching comes with a biological cost that ends up making us
feel tired much more quickly than if we sustain attention on one
thing,” says Daniel Levitin, professor of behavioral neuroscience at
McGill University. “People eat more, they take more caffeine. Often what
you really need in that moment isn’t caffeine, but just a break. If you
aren’t taking regular breaks every couple of hours, your brain won’t
benefit from that extra cup of coffee.”
Studies
have found that people who take 15-minute breaks every couple of hours
end up being more productive, says Levitin. But these breaks must allow
for mind-wandering, whether you’re walking, staring out the window,
listening to music or reading. “Everyone gets there a different way. But
surfing Facebook is not one of them,” he says. Social networks just
produce more fractured attention, as you flit from one thing to the
next.
Gloria Mark, professor in the department of informatics at the
University of California, Irvine, says that when people are interrupted,
it typically takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to their work,
and most people will do two intervening tasks before going back to their
original project. This switching leads to a build up of stress, she
says, and so little wonder people who have high rates of neuroticism, impulsivity, and are susceptible to stress tend to switch tasks more than others.
Hal Pashler, psychology professor at UC San Diego, points out that
not all attempts at multitasking are equally draining. If you’re doing
something on autopilot, such as the laundry, then it makes perfect sense
to read a book at the same time. But attempting to do two challenging
tasks at once will lead to a drain in productivity. “You can’t do two
demanding, even simple tasks, in parallel,” he adds.
And despite the downsides of multitasking, we’re juggling an
increasingly frenetic list of activities, as online notifications
deliver ever more distractions.
Mark believes that we’re being conditioned to increasingly check social media networks and email. She explains:
“Whenever you check email, every so often you get a hit, some great
email received. That happens on a random schedule. In psychology,
that’s called random reinforcement and that’s enough to reinforce
behavior.”
Random behavior can be incredible difficult to combat. And Mark’s
research has found that after being frequently interrupted, people often
develop a short attention span and begin to self-interrupt.
The solution is to give up on multitasking and set aside dedicated
chunks of time for each separate activity. So only check your email
first thing in the morning and again at midday, or set aside 10 minutes
per afternoon for Twitter.
Marks also believes that technology can help protect against its
own distractions, such as software interfaces that force users to take
breaks every couple of hours. And when it comes to long-term projects,
Levitin says you should spend 25 minutes to two hours working on the
project at a time. If you attempt to multitask and spend less than 25
minutes on a challenging task, then, “you’re barely getting warmed up
before you quit.”
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