In a recent NPR Science Friday interview, Dr. Christopher Chabris, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Union College, offers a similar position: “It’s a fallacy that we’re able to multitask and do two or three or four or five things just as well as we could do them if we did them one at a time. The problem is that we don’t really get the sense of how badly we’re performing these multiple tasks at once, and we think we’re doing them just fine.” I know plenty of people who claim to be great multitaskers, but I wonder how much of that is perception vs. reality.

I’m a bit of a productivity nut, and I actually take a few minutes at the end of each day to jot down a few things that I accomplished. This helps me make sure that I really am getting work done and being productive, and it gives me a point of reference that I can use later for status reports or questions about my work. From this experience, I know that I get much more work done when I stay focused on the task at hand by working in chunks to complete one thing at a time. When I try to do multiple things at once, I still get everything done eventually, but the tasks aren’t completed as quickly and quality often suffers as a result.

Your Homework Experiment

• Take two periods of time (maybe four-hour or two-hour periods of time) where you plan to do similar work.
• In one time period, multitask as much as you want.
• In the other time period, turn off Twitter, email and other distractions to focus on one task at a time (working in chunks)
• After you finish each period, write down everything that you completed along with a quick quality assessment of the output.

Which time period allowed you to get the largest amount of work done?

Photo by Flickr user Ryan Ritchie used under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

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According to a recent study published in the August 24 edition of “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” by Stanford researchers Clifford Nass, Eyal Ophir and Anthony Wagner, the answer is an unqualified “no.”

Nass said the idea for the study came about because he would see students who seemed to be amazingly skillful at multitasking and wanted to learn what their secret was.

Nass and his colleagues began their research by locating a group of 100 students composed of both “high multitaskers” and “low multitaskers.” The high mutitaskers were those who routinely used four, five or more media at one time (texting, reading email, chatting on the phone etc.). The low multitaskers used, on average, no more than two media at one time. The goal of the study was to see which elements of multitasking the high multitasking group performed better at, when compared with the low multitasking group.

“We were shocked to find out that the high multitaskers did worse than the low multitaskers in all three basic aspects of successful multitasking,” says Nass. The three aspects the study examined were:

• The ability to focus on the relevant and ignore the irrelevant. In order to multitask well, you need to be able to very quickly decide between what’s important and what you are going to pay attention to, and what’s irrelevant. “High multitaskers are suckers for irrelevancy,” says Nass. “Everything distracts them.”
• The ability to keep information well organized in the brain. If you think of the brain as a bunch of filing cabinets, the high multitaskers had messier cabinets than their lower multitasking counterparts, and had a harder time finding what they needed.
• Being able to switch from one task to another. Good multitaskers need to be able to mentally go from one activity to the next, without significant cognitive downtime. The more the high multitaskers were required to do this, the worse they were at it.

The results of the study have lead Nass and his colleagues to conclude that one of two things is true. Either multitasking is harmful to high multitaskers’ brains and is worsening their ability to focus, or people who are high multitaksers are naturally bad at these things. “Either way,” says Nass, “multitasking is a problem, and people should not be deluded into thinking that it works. It hurts productivity, and it may be hurting your thinking process,” he says.

If all of this is not enough to make you stop and do one thing at a time, consider the fact that the Stanford study is not the first of its kind to point out that multitasking makes us stupid. One report from the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London found that when workers are constantly juggling emails, phone calls and text messages, their IQ falls ten points. Another recent report by Rubinstein, Meyer and Evans found that when people switched back and forth between tasks, there was a substantial loss of efficiency and accuracy — in some cases, up to 50 percent.

Now are you convinced to put down the iPhone while you peruse the Internet? If so, to fight distraction and find your focus, here are a few hints excerpted from “Time Management In An Instant: 60 Ways to Make the Most of Your Day“:

• Create designated task times. By setting aside a selected time period to do all your phone calls, emails or errands at once, you will reduce the amount of time you spend going back and forth between them.
• Put a system in place that lets you capture all incoming to-dos in writing. Instead of feeling pressure to do the item “now” (lest you forget), your brain can relax, secure in the knowledge that you have the item identified and stored.
• Maintain a desktop inbox. Don’t just rely on your electronic mail box or filing system. By putting a physical inbox on your desk, you will be able to temporarily place items that need your attention in a location where you can easily find them.
• Turn off technology. The ding of an email coming in, the buzz of the BlackBerry etc. — all these seemingly harmless inputs can tempt you to stray from the job at hand and multitask.

Are you a high multitasker or a low multitasker? How do you think it affects your productivity?

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As an IT teleworker for a large company over the past 10 years, I’ve spent my share of time on conference calls. The other day, in fact, I set a personal record with 11.5 hours of them in a single work day (and I had the sore headphone ear and hoarse voice that came along with that feat). Despite this meeting load, I still had to respond to IM’s, reply to a multitude of emails, prepare slides early in the day for a presentation later on, and a host of other tasks. That begs the question:

How do you effectively multitask in meetings in a way that lets you get work done?

When you can and when you can’t

First, you have to recognize where the multitasking opportunities are. Obviously, when you are presenting a set of slides or walking through some code to an audience, doing anything else is next to impossible. On the other end of the spectrum, if you were invited to provide details that might not even get covered to a broad group, there’s a decent chance you won’t say anything beyond introducing yourself at the top of the meeting.

Pay particular attention to the agenda shown at the beginning of the meeting. If you don’t have a copy of it, take a quick screen shot of it when it flashes by on whatever desktop sharing mechanism you are using if you can, as that will be your roadmap to multitasking potential. Take note not only of the segments where your opinion might possibly come up, but also be sure to mentally check back into the meeting every 2-3 minutes so you can assess where in the agenda things stand. That decreases the chances you’ll be caught off guard by a question when you weren’t paying attention because you were doing something else.

Short Tasks

David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach to task management is ideal for meeting multitasking since it breaks things down into short time segments. In using this method, whenever something comes into your inbox you assess whether or not it is something you need to keep for reference, something you can delete, something you can delegate to someone else, something you can take care of in less than 2 minutes, or something that needs a longer period of your time. Everything except that last category can be processed in the 2-3 minute time slice you create for yourself during portions of your meeting that aren’t as relevant to you as other segments.

Whatever task management tactics you use, there are always quick hitting items that need attention. Taking care of them while on a meeting where you can multitask keeps them from intimidatingly piling up.

Stop and Start Tasks

Some longer tasks lend themselves to being stopped and started in manageable intervals that can match up with those 2-3 minute segments you’ve carved out for yourself while the meeting is going on. Maybe you have some long technical article to read through that lends itself to stopping every few paragraphs to check back in with your teleconference. When a slide presentation needs to be prepared for later in the day, stopping after each slide is done so you can assess how far the meeting has progressed is another example.

Small Physical Tasks

Paper filing, desk cleaning, reloading your beverage if you have a wireless phone — these things are primarily physical rather than mental, and lend themselves to being done while you listen to your meeting. That’s not to say you should go dig the ditch for a new sprinkler line in your back yard while on the phone, but smaller things around the desk are ripe for multitasking.

What to do when you get caught

Make no mistake, if you frequently try to multitask during meetings you will eventually get caught. Someone will ask you a question and, because you were off multitasking, you won’t know what that question was. There are good and bad ways to recover from this situation.

Some will tell you to feign ignorance (“I don’t quite understand what you mean, can you rephrase the question?”). Others will tell you to pass the buck to someone else on the call (“I’m not quite the expert on that topic that Anakin is, what do you think Ani?”) However, the best way is to simply cop to it, but be careful about how you choose your words. There is a big difference between:

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying attention, can you repeat that?”

and

“I’m afraid you caught me multitasking on something else for a meeting with my boss later today, can you repeat that?”

Both make you look bad, but the latter makes you look less bad. And that’s the risk you run when trying to multitask: the possibility you could look bad on your current meeting weighed against the cost of not getting as many things done throughout your business day. If you approach multitasking opportunities with a plan, though, you can mitigate that risk and be more productive.

Pete Johnson created one of the first web applications ever built inside Hewlett Packard during the mid 1990′s and has had the good fortune to work with over 400 engineers all over the world, write articles for a variety of publications, and present topics at trade shows. He served as the HP.com Chief Architect for two and a half years before a reorganization brought him his present responsibilities as the Marketing and Internet Platform Services IT, Portals and Applications Chief Architect (try fitting that on a business card). He blogs about how improved non-technical skills can accelerate technical careers at http://nerdguru.net.

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