Category: Attention

It can feel really good but it is reducing productivity by up to 40 percent.

Multitasking can reduce productivity by up to 40 percent, research finds.

And now brain scans show why.

Changing from one activity to another interferes with brain activity.

This makes the end result much worse than if we focus on one thing at a time.

Dr Iiro Jääskeläinen, a neuroscientist and one of the study’s authors, said:

“We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure different brain areas of our research subjects while they watched short segments of the Star Wars, Indiana Jones and James Bond movies.”

Sometimes the films were cut into 50 second fragments, other times they watched full 6.5 minute segments.

Obviously, in reality, we would hope to focus on one task for more than 6.5 minutes — but this is just to simulate the effects of task switching.

The scans tracked the areas of the brain that are important in understanding narratives.

The results showed that the brain works more efficiently when only tracking one task at a time.

Dr Jääskeläinen said that completing one task a day beats trying to do a dozen things at once.

The problem is that multitasking can feel good, despite being less efficient:

“It’s easy to fall into the trap of multitasking.

In that case, it seems like there is little real progress and this leads to a feeling of inadequacy.

Concentration decreases, which causes stress.

Prolonged stress hinders thinking and memory.”

Social media, Dr Jääskeläinen said, is a particularly challenging problem:

“Social media is really nothing but multitasking, with several parallel plots and issues.

You might end up reading the news or playing a game recommended by a friend.

From the brain’s perspective, social media only increases the load.”

Perhaps worse, multitasking could even be causing changes to the structure of the brain, a 2014 study found:

“Using laptops, phones and other media devices at the same time could be shrinking important structures in our brains, a new study may indicate.

For the first time, neuroscientists have found that people who use multiple devices simultaneously have lower gray-matter density in an area of the brain associated with cognitive and emotional control.”

The study was published in the journal Human Brain Mapping (Lahnakoski et al., 2017).

Multitasking means working on two or more tasks at the same time, which psychological research finds is bad for productivity, mostly.

Multitasking, doing two or more tasks at once, mostly gets a bad rap from psychological research.

Examples of multitasking include:

• texting while driving,
• watching TV while working,
• and watching YouTube while writing emails.

Multitasking is something that’s best avoided for any task that needs concentration.

Humans don’t multitask well, unless one of the activities is automatic and doesn’t require much conscious processing.

Multitasking is bad for productivity

Multitasking is distracting and once it becomes a habit may make people more distractible.

Multitasking tends to slow people down because switching between tasks has a cost.

People generally work quicker when they focus on one task at a time and do it properly.

Multi-taskers tend to make more mistakes: think about the modern trend for using a mobile phone while driving.

For all these reasons and more it is no surprise that multitasking probably reduces productivity by up to 40 percent, and even shrinks important structures in our brains.

Changing from one activity to another interferes with brain activity.

This makes the end result much worse than if we focus on one thing at a time.

Some research even suggests that media multitasking is associated with emotional problems, like anxiety and depression, as well as cognitive problems, like poor attention.

Certainly, multitasking mostly makes people feel sad and fearful (Blank et al., 2020).

Improve multitasking

Sometimes, though, multitasking cannot be avoided.

And psychologists have found simple ways to improve multitasking for those multitaskers among us.

1. Physical fitness

Physical fitness increases multitasking skills by increasing the size of crucial areas of the brain, research finds (Wong et al., 2015).

Neuroscientists found larger gray matter volume in several brain areas of those who had higher cardiorespiratory fitness.

These brain areas help boost both reasoning and problem-solving.

2. Short breathing exercise

A short breathing exercise is enough to refocus the minds of highly distracted people (Gorman & Green, 2016).

The mindfulness task simply involves counting groups of nine breaths: nine inhales and nine exhales.

Heavy media multitaskers benefit most from simply counting their breaths, psychologists have found.

Training in multitasking

Despite all the disadvantages of multitasking, the fact that people frequently attempt to multitask means we have a capability that can be explored.

What levels of multitasking might we be capable of with effort?

A classic 1976 study which taught two people to read and write at the same time hints at our considerable potential to multitask (Spelke, Hirst & Neisser, 1976).

Professor Elizabeth Spelke and colleagues at Cornell University wanted to know whether we can really divide our conscious attention between two demanding tasks, like reading and writing.

To find out they recruited two participants willing to put in 29 hours of practice over a 6 week period: Diane and John were their volunteers.

Before the training Diane and John’s normal reading and comprehension rates were measured, so it could be compared with post-training.

Then Spelke and colleagues set about their three-phase training regime.

Multitasking phase 1: Simultaneous reading and writing

The first step to multitasking was to get Diane and John reading and writing at the same time.

To do this they read short stories by authors like Katherine Mansfield at the same time as writing down a list of words being dictated to them.

Afterwards the experimenters checked their story comprehension and memory for the list of words.

This procedure was continued throughout all three phases of the study.

Naturally, when Diane and John first tried multitasking their reading speed, comprehension and memory all deteriorated.

But surprisingly, after six weeks, they could read just as fast and with the same level of comprehension whether or not they were also taking dictation at the same time.

They also often recognised more than two-thirds of the dictated words.

There is a problem with this study so far though: it’s possible that Diane and John weren’t really multitasking but had just leant to take dictation automatically and unconsciously.

Spelke and colleagues knew they had to push Diane and John harder.

Multitasking phase 2: Detecting patterns

Over the next few weeks Spelke and colleagues tested Diane and John’s higher-level awareness of the dictated lists.

Instead of dictating relatively unrelated words, patterns were now surreptitiously inserted into the lists, sometimes whole sentences.

Without forewarning Diane and John found these difficult to spot, but once told to search for the patterns they started noticing rhymes, categories of words and even sentences.

Although still missing a few, they did spot many of the patterns the experimenters hid in the sub-lists while they were multitasking.

Remember that this is all at the same time as reading an unrelated story at their normal speed and level of comprehension.

In this second phase the participants’ multitasking is even more impressive and it’s harder to argue that the dictation has become automatic and unconscious because Diane and John could spot many of the patterns.

Multitasking phase 3: Reading while categorising words

After the 16 weeks of the study it seemed that both Diane and John could categorise lists of words and write down the name of the category at the same time as reading, and understanding, a sophisticated and completely unrelated short story.

In the third and final phase Diane and John were asked to just write down the category to which the words belonged rather than the words themselves.

Again, their reading speed initially dropped when they were given this new task, but soon, with practice, it was back up to its original level.

Not only that but their reading speed and comprehension of the short story was unaffected compared with their pre-training tests.

Quite an impressive feat of attention.

Criticisms

Not everyone accepts that what Diane and John were doing was really multitasking.

Here are some of the objections:

• One of the tasks became automatic and therefore unconscious.
• Similarly, people have complained the tasks weren’t hard enough: reading and writing are already highly practised skills.
• Diane and John were learning to switch their attention from one task to the other very quickly, not focus on both at the same time.
• Two people is a very small sample size!

An impressive performance

These are all good points, but ultimately there’s still an impressive human performance here that requires explanation.

Whether or not Diane and John were really multitasking, the research certainly implies that we can train our attention to carry out two sophisticated tasks which require conscious deliberation at the same time.

This is more than just simultaneously talking and driving, or patting the head while rubbing the stomach: both reading and writing involve relatively deep processing of similar types of linguistic information.

Spelke and colleagues were clearly very impressed with Diane and John’s new abilities and they suggest there may be no limits to training human attention, perhaps even no limits to our general cognitive capacity.

All we need is some creativity along with plenty of time and practice.

Truly efficient multitasking may be within people’s grasp — with a lot of practice.

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Even the best of us get distracted, so find out how to focus better and increase attention on whatever you choose.

Learning how to focus is vital in a world of constant distractions.

To achieve anything is life, you must be able to focus.

Unfortunately, people who are highly creative are also very easily distracted.

One of the most famous examples was the French writer Marcel Proust, who lined the bedroom where he wrote with cork and used ear-stoppers to help him concentrate.

So, if you find it hard to learn how to focus you are in good company, don’t worry.

Try these science-backed steps for a laser-like mental focus:

1. Choose only one thing to do

Our conscious attention is not really designed for doing more than one thing at a time.

First and foremost, then: choose just one thing to do.

This is easy to say, harder to follow through on.

Often there is a larger task which is chunked down into smaller tasks.

When one task is tricky or you get stuck, it’s easy for attention to slide off to something else.

Keep floating from one half-finished task to another, though, and nothing ever gets finished.

Pick one task or sub-task and stick to it until it’s either done or you’ve decided it really can’t be done now.

2. Concentrate on your best time of day

People are best at how to focus at different times of the day.

For a lot of people it’s the morning, for others it’s the afternoon or evening.

Whenever you feel most focused — or are least likely to be distracted — use that time for tasks that require the focus.

3. Short breathing exercise

Breathing exercises can you teach you how to focus.

Before you start work, do a little breathing exercise.

This is enough to refocus the minds of highly distracted people, research finds.

Heavy media multitaskers benefited most from simply counting their breaths.

Simply count groups of nine breaths: nine inhales and nine exhales.

A few minutes of this will do.

4. How to focus: mindfulness

Everyone gets distracted while they are trying to focus.

It’s normal and it’s better to see it as inevitable when you get distracted.

While working away at your task, try to bring the mind gently back to what you are doing.

Don’t chide yourself or get down when the focus slips.

Just note the distraction and nudge the mind back to where it is supposed to be.

5. Brief diversion

Attention gets tired over time — it happens to everyone.

After 10 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour or whatever, the mind starts to fatigue.

It is much better to take a short break when this happens rather than just ploughing on.

Studies show that when people take a short break they return with renewed vigour.

It only needs to be 5 minutes, or whatever works for you.

6. Take a walk, appreciate nature & doodling

Walks work wonderfully as a break from trying to focus.

Often, though, a walk is out of the question.

If so, why not try doodling on a piece of paper.

Doodling helps the mind relax because it is a ‘pointless’ task.

At the very least, try the short breathing exercise again (number 3).

Can’t manage that?

Even just looking at a picture of nature can help your attention.

Try resetting your desktop background.

7. Refocus

After a break, it’s time to refocus.

If you are finding this difficult, then use the mindfulness strategy again.

Gently nudge your mind towards what it is supposed to be doing.

Remember to be nice to yourself!

8. How to focus: self-check

It’s easy to get distracted without really noticing that you’re distracted…

…because…well…you’re distracted…

However, learning to periodically self-check can improve attention and help people focus better on tasks, research finds.

The study’s authors write that attentional lapses occur because:

“…humans do not adequately monitor how well they are attending from moment to moment.

Lapses emerge gradually and may be detected too late, after the chain of events that produces behavioral errors has been initiated.”

9. Adjust the task if you lose focus

Still losing focus?

Try adjusting the task.

Tasks that are either too easy or too hard cause us to mentally check out.

Can you set yourself a time-limit for easy tasks to make them harder?

Can you chunk down a difficult task to make it easier?

Adjust them so the challenge is in the sweet-spot: not too easy, not too hard.

Tasks that fit our skills but push us a bit are easier to enjoy: and so it’s easier to focus.

10. How to focus: listen to your body and mind

If the body or the mind start to ache, give it a break.

There’s a limit to how much we can get done.

When the head starts to hurt, the body to complain, then that’s the sign that it’s time to stop.

There’s no point pushing on and doing bad work.

Give it a rest until later, or until tomorrow.

Dodgy work is a waste of time — go and do something fun instead!

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