Single-tasking Series: Part 4 – Procrastination, Multitasking’s Fat Ugly Cousin
“Procrastination is the thief of time.” Some famous guy whose name I’ll look up at some point
This is part 4 of the increasingly inappropriately named Singletasking trilogy Singletasking Series. I’d hoped to post it sooner but I’ve been putting it off for a while.
Procrastination is common, affecting everyone to some degree, at some point.
It is not, as many people often believe, related purely to time management.
Procrastination is the fat ugly cousin of multitasking.
The adept procrastinator is an eager multitasker and the enthusiastic multitasker multitasks as a means of procrastination.
So, you’re a procrastinator, welcome to the club.
But what can we do to use that fact to our advantage?
<to be continued>
Sorry, just need to take care of something shap-shap…will finish this post soon..promise.
Singletasking Series: Part 3 – Understanding Multitaskalism
This is the third post in a series on Singletasking (in case you missed the bit in the heading that says, “Part 3″).
People around the world are multitasking with reckless abandon. They are addicted and they don’t even know it. This affliction is so widespread we don’t even notice it anymore.
For lack of a better word, I’ve decided to call this pandemic “Multitaskalism“
(OK, technically it already has a better name. ADT or Attention Deficit Trait.)
Multitaskalism can be defined as the result of the mental reprogramming that occurs over time when people habitually try to tackle multiple tasks simultaneously.
Symptoms of Multitaskalism:
- The knowledge that you could and should be producing more than you are;
- The feeling that you’re smarter than your output seems to suggest;
- Responding to questions more hurriedly and with less well-considered answers than you should
- The feeling that the reservoir of new ideas is starting to run dry and that the few new ideas that are coming through are sometimes only half-formed;
- Working longer hours but producing less;
- Sleeping less and having less free time for exercise and socialising;
Causes of Multitaskalism
- Access to an increasing number of inputs and outputs
- Living in the digital age, we presume that human brains are like giant organic CPUs and we tend to treat it as such
- Switching attention from one thing to another has a stimulant effect, caused by the release of chemicals within the brain. This form of chemical stimulation is addictive
- The diversity of the average workday, so critical in alleviating boredom, means our mental resources are constantly pulled in a variety of directions
- The increase in the number of communication channels and the ease of communication means that the nature of interpersonal interaction has changed. It’s more frequent and often brief, which equates to regular interruption.
- Intake of stimulants like caffeine may also be a compounding factor.
Possible long-term effects of Multitaskilism
- Rewiring of the brain, making it function in a specific way
- The diminished ability to hold on to and fully develop specific and complex ideas
- Emotional strain due to the reduced ability to understand and manage emotions
- Reduced ability to process and structure information, especially complex information.
- Reduced ability to store and recall information – i.e. reduced memory function
- Reduced ability to break complex tasks down into simpler individual tasks
- Reduced ability to order and prioritise tasks
Have you experienced any of these symptoms or effects? Are you a victim of multitaskalism?
Is this even a real phenomenon? I’d love to know what you think.
Single-tasking Series: Part 2 – Why and How we Multi-task
(Click here if you missed Part 1 in this series)
“A hidden energy crisis threatens our world. Society throws people into chronic physical, emotional, and spiritual depletion. Multi-tasking lets us manage a deluge of very real duties, but it also jeopardizes the now.”
I’ve found some great reads on the subject of multitasking:
- The most entertaining, and longest, has to be the Autumn of the Multitaskers – (definitely worth a read if you’ve got the time and attention span.)
- Time Magazine‘s article on The Multitasking Generation gives some insight into the effects of multitasking on the new (they’re younger than me so I can call them “new”) generation,
- the most eye-opening article thus far has, without a doubt, has been Why can’t you pay attention anymore?
What’s become clear from reading these articles is that this phenomenon is not really new. It has been studied and talked about for years now, yet no-one really pays much attention (pun intended).
To better understand it, I think it important to look at the processes and mechanisms at work.
How the brain handles multitasking
The human brain IS able to multitask BUT ONLY in a limited number of ways.
I can type this blog post and chew gum at the same time.
I can also drive while listening to music or maybe even an audio book.
If I were to type this blog post while driving however, I’m pretty sure there’d be a problem. What about typing while listening to an audio book?
The effects of multitasking are largely related to the how the brain is used when performing certain functions.
Generally speaking, tasks for which you have reached the level of unconscious competence (you can perform these tasks effectively without thinking about performing them) are more suitable for multitasking.
“Passive” tasks (e.g listening to music) too are easier to multitask.
Tasks that use the same part of the brain are less suitable for multitasking (e.g. having a telephone conversation while typing an email). When one part of the brain needs to handle two or more tasks, it needs to take care of them one at a time.
While the brain can multitask in limited ways, conscious attention can only be focussed on a single activity at a time.
The problem is that everyday we are faced with more things competing for that attention. (The Attention Economy).
What this leads to is a tendency towards trying to tackle more tasks simultaneously than your brain can handle. for many of these tasks, it is simply not possible to truly multitask. Instead, you sequenci-task – tackling each one briefly and incompletely before cycling through to the next task. To compensate, you have to give less than 100% to each of them.
Stimulation vs Performance
When we switch from one task to another, it triggers a chemical response within the brain, creating a stimulant effect.
The old idiom of, “Change is as good as a holiday” may hold a deeper truth – stimulants are a substitute for rest.
The relationship between stimulation and performance is a bell curve – with low-level stimulation there are increases in productivity but beyond a certain point, the level of productivity decreases. One cup of coffee wakes you up, gives your neurons a jump-start and improves mental performance. Five cups is likely to make you feel wired and restless, decreasing productivity.
Relating this point back to the earlier one, it’s clear that multitasking helps fight boredom and stimulates the mind. It gives a mild, almost imperceptible buzz. However, excessive multitasking puts us at risk over-stimulation, which creates that feeling of being ‘all over the place’ mentally.
We multitask because we can and because it makes us feel good. It becomes habitual and it becomes chronic.
Are you a chronic multitasker?
Single-tasking Series: Part 1 – Does Anyone Have My Attention?
Is modern living spreading your mental faculties like too little non-dairy butter substitute over too much gluten-free toast?
That’s the gist of this entire series of posts really.
To start with, take a look at the Carte Blanche Web 2.0 segment from a few weeks ago:
This piece has already generated a fair bit of comment on the local blogosphere (note to self: must find a better word for this) so I’m going to refrain (for now at least) from discussing how it missed the mark.Instead, with regard to the topic of multi-tasking, a couple of quotes stand out for me:
Dave Duarte: “The pace of change now is not only unforeseen, it is unmanageable. So we’ve got so much stuff coming at us, the expectation for us to keep up with it is not really realistic. “
Rafiq Phillips: “It’s continuous, it’s always happening. Someone is always asking you a question or asking you to send them an email. You’re always communicating…Continuous partial attention, that’s what it’s about, because you’re always busy with something.”
That last line especially – always busy. partial attention.
Gail Curtis (CEO Saatchi & Saatchi SA): “What the new generation is doing and particularly the youth market, they’re doing their homework, they’re talking on the mobile phone they’re playing games and they’re watching TV. So they’re multitasking and working very, very quickly.”
Working very, very quickly – but what’s the quality of output like?
What I’m (unsubtly) trying to point out, is the bias towards multitasking in the digital age and the presumption that an increased number of inputs sources and output mechanisms equates to increased productivity and efficiency.
I’d have to say that in my own experience this is simply not the case.
In the past 10 years I have effectively (and unwittingly) reconditioned my brain to function through continuous partial attention – constantly shifting focus and spreading efforts across multiple simultaneous tasks.
In effect, I have cultivated an attention deficit and I know I’m not the only one.
Do you find yourself increasingly stretching your attention budget?
Can you honestly say that doing more things simultaneously makes you more efficient?
PS – As an example of the multi-task overload I’m talking about, right at this minute I have open and active:
- 8 Firefox tabs,
- 2 MS Word documents,
- an MS Visio diagram,
- a Visual Studio project,
- my RSS feed reader,
- My email client and two individual emails opened for editing,
- MSN Messenger with 2 conversation windows,
- a notepad text file(with some javascript code I’m playing with)
- and a Windows Explorer window.
That’s around 20 tasks competing for my attention and I wouldn’t consider that above the norm.
Zen and the Art of Singletasking
“You can’t pay attention to two things simultaneously. You’re switching back and forth between the two. So you’re paying less concerted attention to either one.”
Something that has really piqued my interest over the last few days has been the concept of “singletasking” – effectively the antithesis of “multitasking”.
Over the past few months I have become increasingly aware of the overheads that result from over-committing limited processing resources. In other words, I’ve noticed that trying to do too much results in too little getting done.
This very blog post is a perfect example.
I started writing it four days ago. In that time I’ve also half-written about 5 other posts. So in four days I’ve written six posts, which would be great if any of them were a) any good, b) complete, c) publishable.
Sadly it’s failure from a to c.
As my awareness of the scatterbrain-tasking phenomenon has grown, so has my determination to reverse the effects of what has, over the past few years, become a thinking-habit.
I’m also curious as to the aggregate effect – if my own experience is an indicator then the broader issue has potentially far-reaching social consequences.
I’ve come across a number of blog posts and articles that has had me thinking about the situation from contrasting angles. For ease of digestion, and not oblivious to the irony of it, I’ve decided to publish these as a series of individual posts rather than as a comprehensive single post.
That way, you (the reader) can pay your full attention to each of the sub-topics and so start down the path to single-tasking utopia.