Multitasking vs. Task Switching

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Isn’t multitasking a great subject? It must be since I keep coming back to it. Today, Matt Yglesias, who is still (barely) a twenty-something, says that he’s long since figured out that true multitasking is impossible (i.e., literally paying attention to multiple things at once), but:

I’m never totally sure what it is that people mean by “multitasking.” Does switching between tasks rapidly count? I do that all the time. A little reading, write a post, respond to some emails, send some tweets, then do it all over again. That seems inherent to the life of the professional blogger. And I do think it’s scrambled my brain a bit, insofar as I find it much harder now to read long books than it was when I was in high school….I think people ought to try to distinguish between switching between tasks (useful as more kinds of tasks are invented) and actually trying to do multiple things simultaneously, which seems to me to be a fool’s errand.

Task switching is obviously a different thing than multitasking, and humans have been doing it for a long time. Anytime you get interrupted, either electronically or in person, you have to switch tasks at least briefly. And the cost of this is that you lose your train of thought and have to get it back when you return to your original task.

This is harder for some things than others. Blogging is obviously tailor made for task switching. Each blog post is a single short thought that doesn’t require a ton of concentration to keep in mind. So if the phone rings or someone IMs you, it’s not a big deal. Writing computer code, by contrast, is exactly the opposite: it usually involves keeping a complex problem in working memory for a substantial time as you put together a few dozen or hundred lines of code to address it. When I was in the computer biz, programmers complained bitterly whenever they were deeply into a tricky piece of coding and some yahoo product manager (i.e., me) would wander by their cubicle to ask them why they’d put a button in one place instead of another. Poof! Their concentration was broken and they’d have to spend several minutes regaining it after I left. I’ve done just enough coding myself to understand this state of mind perfectly, and this is no prima donna excuse making. It’s absolutely real.

Still, not everything is like that, and I’ve always thought that although the media onslaught that bathes kids from earliest childhood had obvious drawbacks (most notably a shortening of attention spans), it probably also had advantages. The main one, it seemed to me, was that kids raised this way could probably task switch faster than older people like me. And who knows? In the world of the future, maybe that will be more important than having a long attention span.

But this is what makes the recent research on multitasking so dismal: it turns out that high multitaskers can’t task switch faster than others. In fact, they’re worse at it. They’re worse at everything.

Now, who knows. Maybe experiments in the lab are incomplete. Maybe things will be different for kids who grow up this way from earliest childhood. Maybe. But I doubt it. More likely, critical brain functions are being lost, and nothing is being gained in return. It’s kind of grim.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate