Thoughts on multitasking
When we multitask, we force our brains to continuously move information around. Ever notice how your computer starts to slow down and the disk light flashes more when you have a lot of apps open? The computer has to constantly rotate information from the hard disk to RAM depending on which app you’re using. Our brains are very similar. Unlike computers, however, which never get tired, our brains very quickly get tired.
Another problem is that our brains are built to remember uncompleted tasks. As we start to stack up uncompleted tasks, more and more of our mental computer becomes engaged in tracking the uncompleted tasks, leaving less available to deal with the problem in front of us.
The net result is that multitasking brings about a short-term pop in productivity, for maybe a couple hours (if that), but productivity swiftly declines after that. Unlike other skills, which improve as we use them, our performance while multitasking does not improve: instead, our ability to concentrate on a problem may actually decline because we develop the habit of switching too often and too soon.
An office with a lot of multitasking is almost always one in which work flow and office routines are not well developed or thought out. Most so-called emergencies aren’t.
So how is that some people (e.g. athletes) appear to do multiple things at once? If you practice something until it becomes second-nature, then you can appear to multitask. The key is that the practiced activity no longer takes any appreciable amount of concentration: think of it as a body macro. However, like macros they are hard to interrupt, change on the fly, or pick up in the middle if you do get interrupted.
