Attention Intervention: Digital Natives and the Myth of Multi-Tasking
Comments: 5 - Date: September 5th, 2008 - Categories: Information Overload
This summer, I worked at my first real-world job. Forty-hour weeks, company-provided computer, something resembling an office: the whole shebang. Though I was working at a pretty technology-positive company—Microsoft!—I still quickly discovered that my working habits required some explanation. Fifty browser tabs open at once, music softly playing in headphones, cell phone parked firmly by my keyboard: I can understand why my co-workers might have been curious.
What ever happened to old-fashioned “discipline?” This question has come up constantly in my conversations with parents and teachers over the course of my involvement with the Digital Natives project. When parents glance over and see not only 50 browser tabs open on the family computer, but iTunes and a computer game and AIM too—with a book report relegated to a tiny corner of the screen—they’re understandably bewildered. How do kids ever get anything done? “I’m just really good at multi-tasking, Mom,” a savvy student might reply. And, as long as the work gets done, it seems hard to argue with that logic.
However, as a new wave of research on the science of attention makes the rounds of blogs and the popular press, that logic is becoming more vulnerable. In an interview over at Lifehacker recently, Dave Crenshaw discussed his latest book, The Myth of Multitasking. Crenshaw makes a strong distinction behind “background tasking”—reading a magazine while waiting in line, for instance, or listening to music while coding—and “switch-tasking.” Most of the time, when we talk about “multi-tasking,” we’re actually talking about the very costly practice of “switch-tasking.” Every time you switch your attention from one place to another—even from one browser window to another—you take a significant hit to your focus. Though this may seem to be common sense, the science behind the phenomenon is quite sobering. Early in the summer, I attended a talk by neuroscientist John Medina—author, most recently, of Brain Rules—at which he also debunked the “myth of multitasking.” Switch-tasking, he definitively proves, causes you to execute each task more slowly than you would otherwise, with more errors. (Charts and more information here.)
So what, then, is the solution? Specifically, what can parents, teachers, and employers do to help their kids, students, and employees focus their attention more effectively? As a kid, student, and employee myself, I have to say that I believe the solution is emphatically not to limit access—at least not for older teens. Rather, I think the key lies in laying out the facts and discussing strategies. Information overload and the allure of infinite access, after all, are challenges that affect everyone with an internet connection—not just young people. And, though writing a stellar book report might not be a cause compelling enough to warrant total focus, every young person will at some point find a pursuit worth paying attention to. Maybe it’s writing short stories; maybe writing music. Maybe it’s making art. But when that pursuit comes along, they’re going to want to know how to firewall their attention, focus their efforts, and—for once—stop switching. Tools like Freedom, the WiFi-disabler for Macs, can help. But ultimately, no strategy will be effective without the investment of the person executing it. The best strategy, I believe, is actually to help Digital Natives to discover pursuits worth focusing on in the first place. The rest, I think—I hope—will follow.
What are your strategies for “firewalling” your attention? Have you ever staged an attention intervention? What will it take to convince companies to stop venerating “multi-tasking” as a worthy skill? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
Comment by sy - September 5, 2008 @ 9:02 am
Thanks for this! Fascinating, vexing! I use all sorts of tactics for firewalling, but I don’t have much of a strategy overall. A central challenge is that the vast majority of my work tasks require a Net connection, thus tools like Freedom aren’t terribly helpful. Moreover, only a very negligible number of my work tasks do _not_ require a computer, networked or not. I’ve tried forcing “digital” tasks into the real world (like printing documents for proofreading), but the transaction costs are usually too high (e.g., printing a document for proofreading, penciling in edits, but then having to enter your edits into a soft copy of the document in order to share them). As a result, the key for me has been working on mental tricks for remaining focused. One collateral effect is that, increasingly, the computer (networked or not) has become for me _the_ site of work and newsreading, two not always pleasant families of activity. My own leisure, pleasure, hobby and related activities are _re_-migrating offline, in order to be shielded from work and not the other way around.
Comment by Dave Crenshaw - September 5, 2008 @ 10:41 am
Thank you for hte mention, Dianna.
The fastest method I’ve found for helping people realize the cost of Multitasking is the numbers/letters exercise in the book. We’ve posted a version of that exercise for your readers at:
http://www.timegym.com/exercise.php
All the best,
Dave Crenshaw
Comment by Dave Crenshaw - September 5, 2008 @ 10:42 am
P.S. My apologies for the misspell of your name, Diana
Comment by Ivo Quartirolii - September 11, 2008 @ 12:58 pm
Around one year ago I mused about multitasking on Multitasking to nothing/
Pingback by MULTI-TASKING OR SWITCH-TASKING? | Sekolah Bogor Raya - September 20, 2008 @ 8:30 pm
[…] perusing my RSS reader, I came across a post by Diana Kimball in the Digital Natives blog, titled Attention Intervention: Digital Natives and the Myth of Multi-Tasking. This post makes it quite clear that most of what goes by the name of multi-tasking is in reality […]