The interwebbers are abuzz over an article titled “The Autumn of Multitaskers“, a wandering study and story of multitasking and its many and varied pitfalls, chief among which is the argument that multitasking is a productivity illusion. It allows you to look busy, but really you end up doing both things half-arsed. Bloggers of the world nod along in agreement, hailing it as a revelation while reading it on their iPhones, listening to the latest Arctic Monkeys on the commute in to work (while another tab loads up in the background).
The main point made in the article is that multitasking requires the brain to chop and change between tasks frequently, forcing it to move from a deep-involvement to shallow-involvement, and the penalty of multitasking is a drain on productivity, reportedly costing $650 billion a year in America in lost value
For the most part, I would agree with the point of the article, but there are two things that I would take to task about this.
The first is that this is somehow news. Breaking: doing many things at the same time means not everything is done perfectly! The author’s primary example is when he used a phone in his car, and nearly ended up killing himself. Can you say ‘duh’? Other examples are cited, though some, such as Enron’s ability to appear to be a successful trading company while really being a shonky outfit, is dubiously connected to multitasking.
The ‘revelation’ part of this article should be the part of the scientific study that suggests the hormonal shift of chemicals could be damaging in the longer run (it shouldn’t surprise that hormones shift), and the effect this particularly has on kids. Little column inches are dedicated to this, though to be fair it would make for dry reading.
The second is the excuse that the metaphor of brain-as-computer is somehow part of the cause of multitasking, as though computer multitasking has translated into expectations of human multitasking. This is part of the point that many are picking up on around the net, suggesting that somewhere we went overboard with the ability of computers to multitask, and that’s now harming us.
The reality is, as any credible 3rd year computer science student should be able to tell you, computers don’t multitask any better than we do. Until the recent popularisation of dual-core and multi-CPU machines, computers by and large had one CPU, one ‘brain’. Multitasking was an illusion provided by the operating system, where it did exactly what our brains do – puts down the current bit of work, picks up the next bit of work, and works on it, the loop repeating ad infinitum.
The metaphor of brain-as-CPU is a poor one because we can’t do the mathematical calculations as quickly. However, it is an appropriate one when it comes to multitasking, because computers do exactly the same thing. (One might suggest something about ‘in our own image’, if one was so inclined.) The argument that somehow we model our concept and use of our own brains through the metaphors of things we have made (with our brains), and thus computers are to blame for the multitasking world we find ourselves in is a fallacy, if simply because it is a tautology – we think our brains work as computers because we modelled computers on our brains.
Some in the blogging world have taken this as a revelation, and the enlightenment suggests why people maximise program windows (to see more? no, to focus more, obviously!), and the success of the full-screen writing apps recently. I would contend that you’re conflating one issue (multitasking vs single task focus) with other issues entirely (reduction of distraction temptations, more screen real estate). Computers have not foisted multitasking upon humanity, they have merely enabled it to run away from our limited abilities to keep up.
I do not argue that multitasking does not reduce competence, but I do argue with the attempt to blame it on our devices. We’re at fault, and our devices are enablers. We’ve worked out how to put multiple brains in computers to improve multitasking, but we’ve yet to get to that point in humans – until then, multitasking remains a high-investment low-return activity.