Independent Exercise: The Myth of Multi-Tasking

David Crenshaw, author of the Myth of MultiTasking created a simple activity to help you clearly understand how multitaking is really robbing you of your precious time.

Click this link, read over the PDF and spend 5 minutes completing this exercise. Reflect on what you experienced. Do you think this same pattern could be showing up in other areas of your life?

Relationships

Multitasking can strain relationships at work and home. How often do you try to read an email while your spouse is talking to you? What if you miss your child’s home run or a perfectly executed music recital because you were updating your Facebook status? Will your employees feel supported if you are slow to respond to communications because you let other tasks interrupt you?

Guy Winch, Ph.D, author of Emotional First Aid: Practical Strategies for Treating Failure, Rejection, Guilt and Other Everyday Psychological Injuries, says that multitasking in the context of relationships has a much bigger effect than most people realize. A recent study from the University of Essex shows that even having a cellphone nearby during personal conversations can cause friction and trigger trust issues.

When you let other things chronically interrupt your attention to important people in your life, your actions are saying that these interruptions are at least as important as the family members or work colleagues who need your full attention. You are not fooling them when you say “yes, dear” or “Yeah, yeah, I got it” from behind your cellphone screen.

Reduced Productivity

In contrast to our perception that multitasking helps us get more done, in reality, we become less efficient. We are losing time during every switch from one task to another.

Psychologists have found that students who multitask while studying perform more less than their peers. In one study the research showed that it took students far longer to solve complicated math problems when they had to switch to other tasks – in fact, they were up to 40 percent slower.

When we move between tasks, we are putting more demands on the brain and thus burning its fuel more quickly. It’s like our brains are cars. When we switch tasks, our brains need to come to a stop on one task and then press the gas pedal to engage in the other task. As mentioned earlier in this lesson, this degree of stopping and starting drains the brain of glucose. Task-switching also promotes exhaustion, even after a short time.

Safety Risks

Multitasking is just plain dangerous in some instances. There are awareness campaigns to convince people not to text and drive. Looking away from the road for even a few seconds may be enough to miss a key piece of information we need for safe driving.

The statistics for texting related accidents are sobering:

• 1 out of every 4 car accidents in the United States is caused by texting and driving.
• Texting while driving is 6x more likely to cause an accident than driving drunk.
• The average driver will cover the length of a football field in the time it takes to answer a text.

We like to think it is safe to talk on our phones or shoot off a quick text response and drive. This attitude persists even when we have experienced a close call while our attention is diverted. After all, when we are talking or texting, we have fewer brain resources available to use to gauge distance, make speed judgments, remain alert for other drivers’ mistakes, etc.

We can apply this same perspective to operating any machinery to demonstrate the risks of overloading our attention and thus losing our focus when our health and safety are on the line.

Missing Out On Life

Perhaps one of the most significant and most overlooked drawbacks of multitasking is that we miss out on so much of life. Not only are we unfocused on our key priority, but we may also miss out on the enjoyment of doing anything at all since we’re so focused on getting to what’s next. A  2009 study from Western Washington University demonstrated that 75% of college students who walked across a campus square while talking on their cellphones did not notice a clown riding a unicycle nearby. The researchers call this “inattentional blindness,” saying that even though the cell-phone talkers were technically looking at their surroundings, none of it was actually registering in their brains.