By M Khalid Rahman
The fact is that young women are exceptionally good at multitasking: executing two or more interrelated or disassociated job processes. They can use chat on IM, write emails, surf the Net, talk on their cellphone while applying mascara and discussing the new neighbour. However, if you ask them an intelligent question their minds refuse to respond and just hang up.
Have you ever noticed someone, ahead of you in traffic, driving in an unsteady manner? Chances are they are multitasking—driving, reading something (like a telephone number), dialing a cell phone and/or engaged in an important conversation.
Studies consistently show that when you try to do a number of things simultaneously – eating, handling the radio or texting – while driving, you put yourself and other traffic at considerable risk. A CPU with multi-threading allows the processor to multitask without an additional processing core but a human brain has certain limits.
An interesting new device, USBFever’s Car Windshield Mount for iPad that you can mount on the windshield or dashboard of your car allows you to watch movies and check your e-mails while driving. It is mounted right in front of you, obscuring your sight and attracting your attention to movie scenes or unread emails. You have to focus on the road at the same time. So it is not safe to use the device while driving.
An interactive game has been designed by veteran multimedia producers Gabriel Dance and Tom Jackson created the distraction game in consultation with psychology professor David Strayer who has led much of the research on cellphone use and driving safety and a professor of mathematical and cognitive psychology, David Meyer, for The New York Times. The game lets you gauge your multitasking skills and distraction potential.
The game simulates speeding through various open gates. To play, watch for the lighted green number. Press the correct number to move to the lane with the open gate. While you navigate the game, a cellphone on the screen allows you to read and respond to text messages. The gates are spaced at intervals and a consistent distant apart to measure reaction time and compare it to others who play the game.
“We weren’t trying to be an exact simulation of driving down the highway or the road — it’s not realistic to have all those gates and people often text in shortened words,” says NYT web producer Danielle Belopotosky, who also worked on the project. “It is a game to give you a sense of how a distraction can decrease your ability to react quickly.”
Time magazine covered what they call “Generation M” – M for multitasking – made up of overstimulated teenagers who constantly split their time and attention between instant messaging, Facebook, Myspace, their iPods, cell phone and blogs.
Meyer frequently tests Gen M students in his lab and he sees no exception for them despite their “mystique” as master multitaskers. “The bottom line is that you can’t simultaneously be thinking about your tax return and reading an essay, just as you can’t talk to yourself about two things at once,” he says.
Meyer says: “The toll in terms of slowdown is extremely large—amazingly so.”
Psychologists say this kind of multitasking is easier for young adults than children or older people because of development in a certain area of the brain, and is also a lot less efficient than focusing on one task at a time.
David Meyer says, “To improve your multitasking skills, pay very careful attention to how tasks are divided into various subparts. Tasks have natural breakpoints in them, where one part of a task is joined to the next. If you can manage to stop at these break-points when switching between tasks, that’s better than if you stop in midstream while some part of a task is still under way. By practicing this, you can learn to schedule actions in tasks so you become better at switching efficiently from one task to another.”
“If you are engaged in very routine tasks that do not conflict much with each other in terms of their required inputs, outputs and mental processes, then you may be okay. But when multitasking gets tougher, you are probably better off to concentrate on just one task at a time.
“When you’re working on more complex tasks or ones that are unfamiliar, this time cost goes up a lot,” says Meyer.
A study reported in the British Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and reported in the BBC News Blog suggests that three skills are critical for successful multi-tasking. They are:
- Paying attention and screening out irrelevant information
- Organizing working memory
- Ability to switch tasks.
The study identified two groups of people: multitaskers, and non-multitaskers, and applied a classic psychological test of each skill to each group. In each case, the non-multitaskers out-performed the multitaskers.
Say the study’s authors:
“The shocking discovery of this research is that [high multitaskers] are lousy at everything that’s necessary for multitasking,” Professor Nass said.
“The irony here is that when you ask the low multitaskers, they all think they’re much worse at multitasking and the high multitaskers think they’re gifted at it.”
Several of the commenters on the blogpost insist either that they themselves are excellent multitaskers, or that the tests selected do not in fact test for multi-tasking. Me, I’m inclined to go with the authors.
The study authors themselves suggest that the remaining “pressing question” is whether multitasking degrades skills, or people with degraded skills are drawn to multitasking. Me, I figure it’s a classic predisposition-plus-opportunity thing, not unlike alcoholism or a bad sense of humor.
I hypothesize that playing an iPhone game while travelling through the Canadian Rockies on a sight-seeing train probably qualifies as multi-tasking. While I couldn’t judge how well they were doing in the digital world, I suggest they were doing badly at noticing the analog world, and their switching appeared pretty clumsy. As to sleeping: hey, what do I know what their nights were like? Maybe they were massively jet-lagged.
But enough about others. I wrote the first paragraph of this blogpost watching a re-run of Two and a Half Men, one I’ve probably seen twice before. And I stopped in the middle to upgrade to Snow Leopard. Plus I like my coffee a lot, and like to claim it keeps me sharp, though I’m increasingly doubting that. So I’m not exactly pure snow here.
Plus, it’s not a value thing. There are a lot of things in this world that require being good at multi-tasking. More than in the past. The ability to focus and concentrate may still be critical to some things, but probably not as many, proportionately, as in the past.
But I do think focus and mindfulness and paying attention are critical to trust. Trust may be more rare, less frequently required, than in the past; but the nature of its requirements haven’t changed.
Maybe the big question is: can we switch gears between multi-task mode and single-minded focus mode? Is there a flip-switch move we can make, an exercise we can conduct, that will let us enter the other realm?
Judging from the couple next to us, it’s doubtful. Their social interaction, unlike most on the train, was pretty much nil, even with each other. And judging from my own experience, changing habits is awfully, awfully hard.
It takes a lot of focus to be able to multi-process, especially since multi-processing degrades the ability to focus.
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While multitasking is invariably useful, excessive multitasking can make it difficult to get things done (as we’ve previously noted). Productivity weblog WebWorkerDaily suggests now may be the time to adopt a singletask approach.
Photo by cesarastudillo.
As the name implies, singletasking is the process of sequentially tackling one task at a time, and only moving on to the next once the first is complete. Despite the simplicity implied by singletasking, the process may require more self-discipline than multitasking warrants.
For one, it means ignoring any urge to procrastinate, and making sure that you prioritize very carefully in advance, lest you realize too late that what you thought was most urgent actually could’ve taken a back seat to something else.
The full post offers specific tips for how-to singletask including replacing multiple task applications like the iPhone-Backgrounder with more single-focused ones and—even more daunting—ditching multiple tabs and only using one screen.
Though we can’t imagine adopting such a course across the board—especially where our beloved Ctrl+Tab is
concerned—singletasking can be an effective focus tool for tackling an important project, especially if it helps us prevent the multitasking mania that email, IM, and other potential web distractions can create.
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Time Managment Skills That Beat Multitasking – 3 Tools for Personal Effectiveness & Stress Reduction
by Paula Eder, Ph.D
Time management is important, and productivity is at a premium – why not multitask?
Multitasking works against you for activities requiring focus. Tests performed by the American Psychological Association in Washington D.C. conclusively prove:
- Each time you switch your attention, you lose ground. The more complex or unfamiliar the task, the harder it is for your brain to make the transition. The more often you switch, the more time you lose, and the more stress you generate.
- A half second delay can kill you. Only a half second of time lost to multitasking can mean the difference between life and death when you use a cell phone while driving. That is all the time it takes for a car not completely under your control to travel far enough to crash.
- With all complex tasks, multitasking wastes time even when it appears to increase efficiency.
Fortunately, there are time management techniques for increasing productivity that work in harmony with how the brain functions. They are excellent stress management techniques, as well.
These 3 Essential Time Management Techniques Work Better Than Multitasking:
- Task Templates:
- Create outlines of complex but repetitive tasks for speedy reference. Don’t waste energy relying on your memory or reinventing the wheel. Use task templates and watch your personal effectiveness soar.
- Jot down projects that need templates as you think of them. The more you work from templates, the more uses you will find for them.
2.To Do Lists:
- Prioritize in advance, and label accordingly.
- List tasks in small, workable chunks.
- Only include what you can realistically accomplish for each day
- Use a weekly to-do list for the remainder of tasks.
- At the end of each day, review and adjust the lists
- Boundaries:
- Create times you do not want to be disturbed in order to work on complex projects.
- Call on others’ support in advance to protect your interruption-free time.
Learn to use each of these powerful tools effectively and consistently. Incorporate them into your daily routine. By enhancing your focus and effectiveness with templates, to-do lists, and boundaries, you enjoy additional benefits from stress reduction.
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Multitaskers bad at multitasking
The people who engage in media “multitasking” are those least able to do so well, according to researchers.
A survey defined two groups: those who routinely consumed multiple media such as internet, television and mobile phones, and those who did not.
In a series of three classic psychology tests for attention and memory, the “low multitaskers” consistently outdid their highly multitasking counterparts.
The results are reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Increasingly, people who are looking at their computer screen are frequently watching TV, listening to the radio, maybe reading print media, chatting, texting,” said Cliff Nass, a co-author on the study from Stanford University.
“On the computer you could be emailing while you have three chats going on while you’re playing World of Warcraft. If you look at classical psychology textbooks, people cannot multitask – but if you walk around on the street, you see lots of people multitasking,” he told BBC News.
“So we asked ourselves the question, ‘what is it that these multitaskers are good at that enable them to do this?'”
Paying attention
The three experiments undertaken by high and low multitaskers were designed to test three aspects that the study’s authors believed must contribute to multitaskers’ skills.
“ The shocking discovery of this research is that [high multitaskers] are lousy at everything that’s necessary for multitasking ”
Clifford Nass Stanford University
In the first, they were tested for their ability to ignore irrelevant information. They were briefly shown a screen with two red rectangles and either 0, 2, 4 or 6 blue rectangles.
The task was to determine whether, when the screen was shown again, one of the red rectangles had been rotated.
Low multitaskers were better at the task, regardless of the number of blue rectangles, whereas high multitaskers got worse at it as the number of distracting blue rectangles went up.
In a test of the degree of organisation of working memory, participants were presented with a series of letters, one at a time, and told to push a button when they saw a letter that they had seen exactly three letters previously.
Again, low multitaskers were significantly better at correctly spotting the repeated letters. Not only did the high multitaskers do worse from the beginning, they got worse at it as time went on.
Thirdly came a test of the participants’ ability to switch tasks. They were first shown either “letter” or “number” on a screen, and then presented with a letter/number pair such as A7.
If the preceding screen said “letter”, they were to determine if it was a consonant or a vowel. If it said “number”, they were to determine if it was even or odd.
After, for example, a series of “number” tasks, the experimenters switched to “letter” tasks. Again, low multitaskers significantly outperformed their counterparts in switching to the new task.
“The shocking discovery of this research is that [high multitaskers] are lousy at everything that’s necessary for multitasking,” Professor Nass said.
“The irony here is that when you ask the low multitaskers, they all think they’re much worse at multitasking and the high multitaskers think they’re gifted at it.”
The pressing question that remains, Professor Nass said, is one of cause and effect: are those people with a dearth of multitasking skills drawn to multitasking lifestyles, or do the lifestyles dull the skills?
The team is actively pursuing new research avenues, such as studying the brain activity of the different groups as they go about their multitasking.
The results could be profound, Professor Nass said, potentially suggesting new means of teaching and even reporting news for those given to a multi-media feed of information.
But at the very least, he said, multitaskers should be told that they are bad at multitasking.
Your Comments
In my experience, those who claim to be able to ‘multitask’ are simply able to do three things badly at the same time! I can’t imagine anyone ever wrote a best-seller or painted a masterpiece while simultaneously chatting on the phone and watching TV. Justin, Bristol, UK
Since taking on a pivotal role within my current company, I am constantly interrupted by people, phones, chat, and messages. My natural attention span has decreased significantly so that even completing an email is usually interrupted by checking other emails, internet news sites and/or listening in to a nearby conversation. Rick, Melbourne, Australia
Another potential conclusion from this research is that the tests they chose did not successfully measure the ability of participants to multitask. Darren, Guildford, UK
Women make better multitaskers then most men, only because their lives depend on multitasking at home and at work…it seems the above study was just computer based, which is probably why the multitaskers didn’t do so well…they were thinking of other things that they should’ve or could’ve been doing. Wendy, New Glasgow, Canada
Surely the ‘multitaskers’ (myself included at times) are just people who tend to not focus their attention on one thing for very long, and are easily distracted by something new. The test seems to be checking how well people can ignore distractions to answer a question correctly, so from that I wouldn’t consider these results unexpected at all. Any time I’ve been ‘multitasking’ I tend to perform slightly less well at each of the tasks I switch between, whether it’s slight misspellings in an email, or something similar. I always try to focus on one thing at a time when it’s very important. Chris Bevan, London, UK
From a personal perspective, I like many other people tend to find that I am most stressed when I have many different things that all need to be done, and end up stressing about task B when I should be concentrating on task A. The best thing I have found is to calm down and relax, make a list and then complete the tasks one at a time until they are completed, whilst ignoring the other tasks until the time comes to complete them. Multitasking just stresses me out and reduces my performance. Human beings are not like computers. Tom Michael, Birmingham, UK
This is surprising. I’m fantastic at it. Perhaps the pool didn’t actually include those who are actually gifted enough to multitask. Rem, London, UK
I don’t see how this tests for multitasking ability at all. They are testing for attention, and attention span, which are two things I’d guess multitaskers show a lack of. They are constantly switching their focus thus having a test that requires focus on a single task / item, won’t test for multi-tasking ability. Andres, New York, USA
I am a multitasker. I have a conference call on mute as I type this. The advantage? Ignoring the detail allows me to focus on the big picture, ensuring my team are always realigning with the strategic objectives. I have a very competent group of focussed people. They’re great with detailed tasks that require focus. They wouldn’t let me near those activities as we all know I’d make mistakes. As a team we understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses and it works well. Sam, Manchester, UK
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Play game and test your multitasking skills
Posted by Rupali Gupta on July 21, 2009, filed in: Health News
Multitasking is a habit that we have developed and we multitask all the time. In fact in many jobs, one of the major requirements is your ability to multitask. Your capability to multitasking can take you long ways in some career paths, but in some situations it can be dangerous. Driving is a perfect example of that.
You must have seen people talking on phone while driving. Some people are so much fascinated with texting that they are actually texting during driving. The question you must be asking yourself if you are talking or texting during driving, how much attentive you are to the surroundings. Just imagine watching a movie and text somebody during a segment of that movie. How much do you remember the part of the movie that was spent in texting? Probably none!
Many states have put and many proposed law to text or even talk on phone during driving. There is enough evidence that says that even if you are talking on phone by using a hands free you are putting your and other people live on stake.
New York Times developed an innovative game that can assess your multitasking skills. The game was developed by New York Times’s senior multimedia producers Gabriel Dance and Tom Jackson. They consulted with David Strayer, a University of Utah psychology professor who has led much of the research on cell phone use and driving safety, and David E. Meyer, a University of Michigan psychology professor and multitasking expert.
This game is designed to simulate the distractions during driving. I found this game very innovative. Although, it is not possible simulate each and every road condition, while driving, but it does give a sense of risk involved in texting, when you are driving. Just remember, events can happen at much faster rate in real life than the distractions in the game and it is these events you want to be cautious of.
Stay safe and healthy driving!
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August 5, 2001
Is Multitasking More Efficient? Shifting Mental Gears Costs Time, Especially When Shifting to Less Familiar Tasks
Studying the “Inner CEO” can improve interface design, personnel training and diagnosis of brain damage
WASHINGTON – New scientific studies reveal the hidden costs of multitasking, key findings as technology increasingly tempts people to do more than one thing (and increasingly, more than one complicated thing) at a time. Joshua Rubinstein, Ph.D., of the Federal Aviation Administration, and David Meyer, Ph.D., and Jeffrey Evans, Ph.D., both at the University of Michigan, describe their research in the August issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, published by the American Psychological Association (APA).
Whether people toggle between browsing the Web and using other computer programs, talk on cell phones while driving, pilot jumbo jets or monitor air traffic, they’re using their “executive control” processes — the mental CEO — found to be associated with the brain’s prefrontal cortex and other key neural regions such as the parietal cortex. These interrelated cognitive processes establish priorities among tasks and allocate the mind’s resources to them. “For each aspect of human performance — perceiving, thinking and acting — people have specific mental resources whose effective use requires supervision through executive mental control,” says Meyer.
To better understand executive control, as well as the human capacity for multitasking and its limitations, Rubinstein, Meyer and Evans studied patterns in the amounts of time lost when people switched repeatedly between two tasks of varying complexity and familiarity. In four experiments, young adult subjects (in turn, 12, 36, 36 and 24 in number) switched between different tasks, such as solving math problems or classifying geometric objects. The researchers measured subjects’ speed of performance as a function of whether the successive tasks were familiar or unfamiliar, and whether the rules for performing them were simple or complex.
Read the journal article
The measurements revealed that for all types of tasks, subjects lost time when they had to switch from one task to another, and time costs increased with the complexity of the tasks, so it took significantly longer to switch between more complex tasks. Time costs also were greater when subjects switched to tasks that were relatively unfamiliar. They got “up to speed” faster when they switched to tasks they knew better, an observation that may lead to interfaces designed to help overcome people’s innate cognitive limitations.
The researchers say their results suggest that executive control involves two distinct, complementary stages: goal shifting (“I want to do this now instead of that“) and rule activation (“I’m turning off the rules for that and turning on the rules for this“). Both stages help people unconsciously switch between tasks.
Rule activation itself takes significant amounts of time, several tenths of a second — which can add up when people switch back and forth repeatedly between tasks. Thus, multitasking may seem more efficient on the surface, but may actually take more time in the end. According to the authors, this insight into executive control may help people choose strategies that maximize their efficiency when multitasking. The insight may also weigh against multitasking. For example, Meyer points out, a mere half second of time lost to task switching can mean the difference between life and death for a driver using a cell phone, because during the time that the car is not totally under control, it can travel far enough to crash into obstacles the driver might have otherwise avoided.
Understanding executive mental control may help solve “fundamental problems,” says Meyer, “associated with the design of equipment and human-computer interfaces for vehicle and aircraft operation, air traffic control, and many other activities in which people must monitor and manipulate the environment through technologically advanced devices.” The research may also aid in personnel selection (given individual differences in executive control), training, assessment and diagnosis of brain-damaged patients (given advances in brain imaging and mapping), rehabilitation, and formulation of government and industrial regulations and standards. In addition, results from the study of executive control may foster a more general understanding of how the brain and human consciousness normally work.
Article: “Executive Control of Cognitive Processes in Task Switching,” Joshua S. Rubinstein, U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, Atlantic City, N.J.; David E. Meyer and Jeffrey E. Evans, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich., Journal of Experimental Psychology – Human Perception and Performance, Vol 27. No.4
Joshua Rubinstein can be reached by phone at (609) 485-4463. David Meyer can be reached by phone at (734) 763-1477.
The American Psychological Association (APA), in Washington, DC, is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States and is the world’s largest association of psychologists. APA’s membership includes more than 155,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 53 divisions of psychology and affiliations with 60 state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance psychology as a science, as a profession and as a means of promoting human welfare.
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- To accomplish two or more tasks simultaneously.
2. The act of a CPU concurrently executing two or more interrelated or disassociated job processes.
- Girls are exceptional at multitasking; they can use chat on Instant Messenger, write emails, surf the internet, talk on their cellular phone, all while applying makeup and talking with their girlfriends about the new boy at school; however, if you ask them an intelligent question their heads will implode.
2. Intel’s new CPU with multi-threading allows the processor to multitask without an additional processing core.
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Tips to effective multitasking
Trina Mukherjee | October 28, 2004
t is a much revered skill at the workplace today.
But how do we define multitasking?
Does it mean doing several things at the same time?
Does it entail juggling several jobs or assignments?�
Does it mean having diverse skills and making optimum use of them?
Attempts to multitask can be honed and polished into a fine skill by some and could�just backfire with others.
This is what some senior professionals have to say about the task of multitasking.
First: The myth: Women and multitasking
No, multitasking is not necessarily a skill that comes easily to�women.
Granted, it began with the homemakers (woman or man; in most cases, women) and has now travelled to the work desks, cubicles and chambers of most offices.
Both men and women avail of this skill.
But the degree to which they do so�is debatable.
Anjali Gupta, vice-president, Asset Reconstruction Company India Ltd, feels that, as far as women (working or otherwise) are concerned, multitasking starts at�home.
Men come into the picture much later.
But Vedika Bhandarkar, managing director and head of investment banking, J P Morgan, agrees with Sanjay Sinha, fund manager, UTI, that the skill is not gender specific.
Some do it often. Others do it when necessary and a few (especially males) choose where and when they plan to do it — at home or at work.
Second: Does multitasking lead to workaholism, burnouts?
Popular perception as well as general surveys point to the fact that multitasking could lead to workaholism and even burnout. But this also happens to be�directly proportional to the number of hours spent at office or at work. And the pace of your professional life.
Most professionals tend to offer their own�antidote to this modern menace of ‘racing against the clock’ syndrome.
Sanjay believes in value addition to the same job. In his case, the value addition involves buying/selling stock and managing a fund.
“One learns to deliver one’s immediate requirements and move on to others. I may manage more than just one fund; present a particular fund to the investors; defend my handling of such a fund to the media and do many add-ons that enhance my job profile,” he explains
For Anjali, multitasking involves “effective time management,”�striking a balance and finding your own comfort zone.
For Vedika, the sheer passion of involvement or enjoying the fact that “you can make oneself more useful and do many things and attend to various needs at varying levels” adds to her sense of job satisfaction.
Third: Multitasking and You
Yes, that makes all the difference.
The job you hold, the amount and kind of responsibilities delegated to you, the number of hours you can spend and the quality of work you can deliver.
Your strengths and limitations, your ambitions and needs: You choose how much, how fast, how often and how many.
Says Anjali, “My job involves long hours and�travelling. There was a time I was struggling to meet my deadlines.
“But you learn to improvise and innovate. I took my eight-year-old child to the hotel where I had to be present for a project. My husband was away on work.
“I�dropped him at the in-house health club after telling the attendants to keep an eye on him and would come and check up on him�after an hour or two.”
Vedika, on the other hand, had promised her daughter�she would attend the Occupation Day held at her Montessori school and watch her play Bob the Builder.
But she, too, had a very important meeting to attend�the very same day. “I had to do some sharp planning. I attended the meeting, slipped out for an hour or so in-between to watch her in action and was back again to rejoin the meeting in progress.”
Men might have less to worry about household matters when it comes to multitasking. “I can afford to be a little lazy about my domestic responsibilities and get away with it,” says Sanjay in a jocular vein.
But what does it say about your job?
Some of us are happy doing the same thing over and over again and getting paid for it at the end of the month.
Some of us need more out of our work.
“Multitasking at your current level leads to other levels and that is a natural progression. The ‘challenge’ factor keeps you going. You can do other things and do them well,” observes Sanjay.
There is another kind of multitasking where your family, social life and private moments jostle with each other to find their own time and space.
“Sometimes I wish I could clone myself and be present at several places at the same time!” says Vedika.
For Anjali, the horror of the very idea of doing the ‘same old boring’ thing keeps her on her toes and her fingers in many pies!
Bye-bye to social/ family life?
You might find yourself constantly having to choose between ‘this’ and ‘that’.
“My child has become more independent and self-reliant today. He knows when I will be around and when I won’t, and plans accordingly,” says Anjali.
“My day is full of reviews, planning, recruitments, meetings,” adds Vedika. “I gently but firmly let my family members know when I will be there and when I won’t be able to make it. The same goes to meeting clients at work.”
One has to be tactful, of course. But honesty is the key to doing more than one thing and being present in more than one place at the same time.
The friends who matter and understand would not mind.
It is you who has to make the choice.
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How about we take a trip down the aisle and learn more about multitasking, what it is, and how we can improve it? I am a proud supporter of efficient multitasking, and I can hopefully show you how I think and how I behave in life so that maybe you can learn from what I do, and maybe teach me a few tricks along the way. So let’s get started!
What is Multitasking?
Quite simply, multitasking is the act of doing more than one thing at once. For example, walk and chew gum is one form of multitasking. It may not seem much, but you are walking and chewing at the same time, which is effectively using the same allotment of time, but doing two activities at once.
Why Multitask?
Isn’t it obvious? We only have 24 hours in a day, and what differentiates the leaders from the slobs, the activists from the non-activists, the brightest from the dumbest, and so on by how we we use our time, also known as time management. If you are doing schoolwork, or a job, multitasking is critical in helping you not only manage your time better, but as well as live your life better and maybe get you more free time for yourself! Isn’t that what we all want in life anyway? “Me” time?
Let’s Evaluate Our Present Multitasking Skill Level
On a scale from 1-10, where 1 is low, and 10 is Godly, how would you characterize your current state of multitasking? Let me clarify the levels a bit.
If you rate yourself a 1, that means you are a total slob. Your life is in disarray, and you don’t know when to start and stop a task. You have a hard time following things through, and you are always missing your deadlines, appointments, and even worse, making other people agitated included yourself.
If you rate yourself a 10, that means nothing can stop you. You can juggle so much tasks at the same time its amazing that you don’t have a personal assistant to help you out. You are on the phone, writing a paper, downloading torrents, playing a game, and watering your garden all at the same time without one task degrading/enhancing the other task.
If you rate yourself anywhere in between, that means you have can multitask, but you want to become better. I don’t blame you, but I want to get better too!
How do I rate myself? I would rate myself as a 7 probably, because I am not to the high pedigree of multitasking that I wish to become, but I am slowly getting there. Let me give you some insight as to how I do things in my life that might be able to benefit your life.
Multitasking – The Office/Home
Here are some things that I do to help improve my efficiency at the office or home that is not specifically computer related:
- Do you cook? How about trying to do several things at once? Have one dish in the microwave, wash the dishes, and listen to the TV/radio all at the same time.
- If you are using an oven, why not make the most of it? While cooking that turkey, how about putting in a tray of cookies or brownies to maximize your oven space.
- On the phone and trying to use your mind to remember stuff? Get a piece of paper and pen and start jotting down notes as you talk.
- If you are at the office and on the phone, I find it useful to bring up MS Word or Notepad and jot down notes as we talk, rather than try to scribble it all down on paper. Once you are done, save the document in an organized folder where you will remember where to look for in the future.
- Some office environments have internal Instant Messengers. If you are lucky to have them, try using them to your advantage. Send a message to that co-worker and while you are waiting for his response, get started on a reply email or work on that special project of yours in between messages to make sure you get your work done in the best way possible.
Of course, there are other examples of multitasking that is obvious, but I’m not going to mention all of them here as it will differ from one scenario to the next. If you got a good multitasking example, by all means share it!
Multitasking – On the Computer
For whatever reason, I am just minimalistic in nature. I hate having cluttered PC, let alone a cluttered desktop. I am working on organizing my computer files hardcore, and I hope to have a document to describe this process in the future. Since I find myself on the computer more so than not, I have picked up some multitasking traits that just seem obvious to me, but maybe not to the average computer user. Here are some good examples of how I use my time on the computer:
- Instant messenger: 90% of the time I use this only certain parts of the day. When I come home from work, I turn on my Trillian program while I go answer Youtube/emails/Blog comments and questions. During this time frame, the success of someone IMing me during this “distraction time” is very high, about 92% that someone will IM me. If it happens, then I answer those questions. However, once I am done with all my daily comments and questions, I turn off Trillian for the night and don’t turn it back on until the next day. I used to have IM on all the time when I am at the computer, but I have learned to cut down on it.
- Learn how to harness the power of the CPU. I have wasting CPU cycles, and idle Internet bandwidth. I feel as if the PC needs to be doing something all the time, because if its not, then I am just waiting the power harnessed within. While writing this blog post today, I have burnt three PS2 games. Although each game took roughly 5 minutes to burn, I didn’t have to sit there babysitting it because I’m on the computer writing this blog article. It’s all about what can you do at the same time without using too much involvement.
- One time I spoke to a friend who was writing a paper,and I told him to go download some program. He said he was writing a paper and he needed to finish it. I think my jaw literally dropped. I said go download that program in the background, and then go work on that paper. By the time you finish the paper, the download is done!
- Do you do video encodes on your PC? How about encoding the movie while you sleep, do other less stressful tasks on the computer, or while you go mow the grass? This is a good way of spending my time. In fact, I may find myself recording a tutorial, and then have the computer start encoding the video before I go and start cooking, or do whatever else task.
- Use a universal chat client. Why have 3 separate programs, when you can have one program that manages them all? Examples include Miranda, Pidgin, Adium, Trillian, and Digsby.
- If your Internet bandwidth is idle, and you know that there is something you want to download, then what are you waiting for? What you can do tomorrow, do it today!
- Have a laptop? There is no shame using the laptop and doing “stuff” while watching the TV or your favorite movie. A lot of the time if you find me online chatting is when I am watching TV or a movie at night anyway!
This right here is a brief list of things that I do in my head to make myself as efficient as possible. To some it is very obvious, and to others it is not. The computer is there as a tool, to help the user and we really should know how to exploit the computer to make our lives better.
What do you think? Have a good example of multitasking? How about an example of where you are poor at multitasking? Let us know, so we can help each other!
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Does Age Affect Multitasking Skills?
Article by Cyndi Root (1,480 pts )
Edited & published by Michele McDonough (88,124 pts ) on Jul 31, 2010
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Multi-tasking or threaded cognition peaks in the early twenties. Young children can only pay attention to one thing at a time, and older adults pay attention to too many things. Nine years old through the twenty-somethings are considered optimal years for information and task switching.
Multitasking
Humans engage in multitasking behaviors to seek and search for information, control the environment and manage performance.
Does age affect multitasking skills? Higher order cognition demands executive control thought to be controlled by the frontal cortex, or threaded cognition to achieve multitasking. The cerebral system develops progressively from infancy towards adulthood with most brain processes peaking in efficiency in early adulthood, including multitasking.
Image Credit: morgueFile.com/mconnors
Hunter Gatherer Society
Seeking and foraging behavior came from our ancestral hunter-gatherer society where making sense of the environment came with abilities to do something about it. Multitasking is an evolved instinctual cognitive mechanism with the environment in mind and with a motivation to use the information.
A child’s brain then and now, develops along with the body and as the body’s capabilities develop, so does the cerebral system, and vice versa. A young child may be able to see a threatening stimuli, such as a tiger but not be able to do anything about it. So, the child performs only one behavior, such as run to its mother. The father though, can multi-task. He can see the tiger, tell his child to run and pick up a spear to defend his family.
The Information Age
In the industrial age and, now, in the information age, series of tasks and information retrieval takes many steps and series of steps to achieve complex performance. Academic fields such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, communications and evolution are working on these issues, especially with the introduction of computers and personal communication devices to everyday life.
The brain must perceive and store information units and then use motor units. or neurons which fire to provide movement in the upper body to continue the thread, and produce more acquisition of information which then splinters to other threads and the need for more information. This subset of multitasking research
is called human information coordinating behavior (HICB).
Early Twenties is Best
According to Cindy Lustig, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, children can only focus on one thing at a time, until about the age of nine, when they can hold more than one idea at a time. High school students and college students are very efficient at organizing and using information, coordinating processes, prioritizing non-linear dynamic interactions with information and tasks.
How does age affect multitasking skills? Older adults have more trouble with task switching because, according to Lustig, seniors have more chatter or multidimensional tasks on their minds. They have problems with limiting the scope of their attention. In other words, they are paying attention to too many things, whereas the child can only pay attention to one thing. In the above tiger example, the senior human might have the whole family’s welfare on their mind and thus be slower to get the spear when needed.
Read more: http://www.brighthub.com/office/career-planning/articles/80557.aspx#ixzz0y5xI6xwr
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You know when geeks think they’re multitasking in front of the computer? Heck, I often think I do. Realistically speaking I’m not… I only do one thing after another, no matter how many windows I have opened.
It’s like this: whenever I upload something to my server, or download a big file from somewhere, I’m switching to another task… say, photoshopping a picture. While theoretically this saves time (when you program too much, you hard-wire “optimization” into your brain!), I’ll mostly end up dabbling with the other task far longer than the download will take… so basically, I’m getting back to the old task after 30 minutes, even though the download only took 5 minutes.
At my last job (one big open room, a phone on every desk!), after a while I made it a rule to never do more than two tasks at the same time, no matter how smallish the third or fourth task would appear. ’Cause here’s what happens if you “multitask.” Say, you’re programming something on site A. Then the manager comes along and wants you to upload site B (maybe your team agreed on putting up a red flag on the desk if you’re busy, but your manager retains the right to overrule the flag with “ASAP” tasks).
Soon thereafter an Outlook alert pops up. Oh, it’s just one of those office joke mails – but if you don’t read them you’ll send around the same joke a month later, and everybody flames you. So you quickly glance through the mail, and then you notice the attachment doesn’t load properly. You end up walking over to your sysadmin, who has a problem with a script at that moment. So you help him with the script, but you don’t know the answer, so the two of you google for a bit. You find a page in the results which isn’t necessary what you were looking for but it seems interesting, so you… OK, you get the point.
Do you still remember the original task I was talking of? Right, site A… it didn’t progress at all for the last hour. And that upload for site B was finished since, well, you don’t really know, and you’re not even sure you uploaded the necessary 12 files, or just 11, because just when you started the upload, your manager came along.
No, this ain’t multitasking… that’s chaintasking. And it’s almost useless, though it may make us feel like we’re achieving more. What really happens is that we’re downsizing our attention frames – proud to have achieved 20 tasks that day, we might have only gotten around to do one or two properly.
Now, I have to get back to what I was doing… I was actually uploading something…
Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime
SAN FRANCISCO — It’s 1 p.m. on a Thursday and Dianne Bates, 40, juggles three screens. She listens to a few songs on her iPod, then taps out a quick e-mail on her iPhone and turns her attention to the high-definition television.
Just another day at the gym.
As Ms. Bates multitasks, she is also churning her legs in fast loops on an elliptical machine in a downtown fitness center. She is in good company. In gyms and elsewhere, people use phones and other electronic devices to get work done — and as a reliable antidote to boredom.
Cellphones, which in the last few years have become full-fledged computers with high-speed Internet connections, let people relieve the tedium of exercising, the grocery store line, stoplights or lulls in the dinner conversation.
The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.
Ms. Bates, for example, might be clearer-headed if she went for a run outside, away from her devices, research suggests.
At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience.
The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn.
“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”
At the University of Michigan, a study found that people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued.
Even though people feel entertained, even relaxed, when they multitask while exercising, or pass a moment at the bus stop by catching a quick video clip, they might be taxing their brains, scientists say.
“People think they’re refreshing themselves, but they’re fatiguing themselves,” said Marc Berman, a University of Michigan neuroscientist.
Regardless, there is now a whole industry of mobile software developers competing to help people scratch the entertainment itch. Flurry, a company that tracks the use of apps, has found that mobile games are typically played for 6.3 minutes, but that many are played for much shorter intervals. One popular game that involves stacking blocks gets played for 2.2 minutes on average.
Today’s game makers are trying to fill small bits of free time, said Sebastien de Halleux, a co-founder of PlayFish, a game company owned by the industry giant Electronic Arts.
“Instead of having long relaxing breaks, like taking two hours for lunch, we have a lot of these micro-moments,” he said. Game makers like Electronic Arts, he added, “have reinvented the game experience to fit into micro-moments.”
Many business people, of course, have good reason to be constantly checking their phones. But this can take a mental toll. Henry Chen, 26, a self-employed auto mechanic in San Francisco, has mixed feelings about his BlackBerry habits.
“I check it a lot, whenever there is downtime,” Mr. Chen said. Moments earlier, he was texting with a friend while he stood in line at a bagel shop; he stopped only when the woman behind the counter interrupted him to ask for his order.
Mr. Chen, who recently started his business, doesn’t want to miss a potential customer. Yet he says that since he upgraded his phone a year ago to a feature-rich BlackBerry, he can feel stressed out by what he described as internal pressure to constantly stay in contact.
In the parking lot outside the bagel shop, others were filling up moments with their phones. While Eddie Umadhay, 59, a construction inspector, sat in his car waiting for his wife to grocery shop, he deleted old e-mail while listening to news on the radio. On a bench outside a coffee house, Ossie Gabriel, 44, a nurse practitioner, waited for a friend and checked e-mail “to kill time.”
“It’s become a demand. Not necessarily a demand of the customer, but a demand of my head,” he said. “I told my girlfriend that I’m more tired since I got this thing.” “It’s become a demand. Not necessarily a demand of the customer, but a demand of my head,” he said. “I told my girlfriend that I’m more tired since I got this thing.”
Crossing the street from the grocery store to his car, David Alvarado pushed his 2-year-old daughter in a cart filled with shopping bags, his phone pressed to his ear.
He was talking to a colleague about work scheduling, noting that he wanted to steal a moment to make the call between paying for the groceries and driving.
“I wanted to take advantage of the little gap,” said Mr. Alvarado, 30, a facilities manager at a community center.
For many such people, the little digital asides come on top of heavy use of computers during the day. Take Ms. Bates, the exercising multitasker at the expansive Bakar Fitness and Recreation Center. She wakes up and peeks at her iPhone before she gets out of bed. At her job in advertising, she spends all day in front of her laptop.
But, far from wanting a break from screens when she exercises, she says she couldn’t possibly spend 55 minutes on the elliptical machine without “lots of things to do.” This includes relentless channel surfing.
“I switch constantly,” she said. “I can’t stand commercials. I have to flip around unless I’m watching ‘Project Runway’ or something I’m really into.”
Some researchers say that whatever downside there is to not resting the brain, it pales in comparison to the benefits technology can bring in motivating people to sweat.
“Exercise needs to be part of our lives in the sedentary world we’re immersed in. Anything that helps us move is beneficial,” said John J. Ratey, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and author of “Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.”
But all things being equal, Mr. Ratey said, he would prefer to see people do their workouts away from their devices: “There is more bang for your buck doing it outside, for your mood and working memory.”
Of the 70 cardio machines on the main floor at Bakar Fitness, 67 have televisions attached. Most of them also have iPod docks and displays showing workout performance, and a few have games, like a rope-climbing machine that shows an animated character climbing the rope while the live human does so too.
A few months ago, the cable TV went out and some patrons were apoplectic. “It was an uproar. People said: ‘That’s what we’re paying for,’ ” said Leeane Jensen, 28, the fitness manager.
At least one exerciser has a different take. Two stories up from the main floor, Peter Colley, 23, churns away on one of the several dozen elliptical machines without a TV. Instead, they are bathed in sunlight, looking out onto the pool and palm trees.
“I look at the wind on the trees. I watch the swimmers go back and forth,” Mr. Colley said. “I usually come here to clear my head.”
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