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Multitasking Can Make You Lose Focus

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 6, 2008

While you are reading this, are you listening to music or the radio? Yelling at your children? If you are looking at it online, are you e-mailing or instant-messaging at the same time? Checking stocks?

Since the 1990s, we've accepted multitasking without question. Virtually all of us spend part or most of our day juggling two or more things at the same time.

While multitasking may seem to be saving time, psychologists, neuroscientists and others are finding that it can put us under a great deal of stress and actually make us less efficient.

"Multitasking is shifting focus from one task to another in rapid succession. It gives the illusion that we're simultaneously tasking, but we're really not," says Edward M. Hallowell, a psychiatrist and author of "Crazy- Busy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap!" (Ballantine, 2006). "It's like playing tennis with three balls."

For some people, listening to music while working actually makes them more creative because they are using different cognitive functions. But you cannot simultaneously e-mail and talk on the phone. I think we're all familiar with what Hallowell calls "e-mail voice," when someone you're talking to on the phone suddenly sounds, well, disengaged.

"You cannot divide your attention like that," he said. "It's a big illusion. You can shift back and forth."
Professor Earl Miller at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says human brains have a very large prefrontal cortex, which help us switch and prioritize tasks. We can do a couple of things at the same time if they are routine, but once they demand more cognitive process, the brain has "a severe bottleneck," he says.

David E. Meyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, and his colleagues looked at young adults as they performed tasks that involved solving math problems or classifying geometric objects.

Their 2001 study, published in The Journal of Experimental Psychology, found that for all types of tasks, the participants lost time when they had to move back and forth from one undertaking to another, and that it took significantly longer to switch between the more complicated tasks.

Although the time it takes for our brains to switch tasks may be only a few seconds or less, it adds up. If we're talking about doing two jobs that can require real concentration, such as text-messaging and driving, it can be fatal.

But Hallowell says that despite our belief that we cannot control how much we're overloaded, we can.

"We need to re-create boundaries," he says. That means training yourself not to look at your BlackBerry every 20 seconds or turning off your cell phone. It means trying to change your work culture so such devices are banned at meetings. Sleeping less to do more is a bad strategy, he says. We are efficient only when we sleep enough, eat right and exercise.

The New York Times

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