Writing assignment- Eng 1302
Multitasking Can Make You Lose … Um … Focus
By Alina Tugend
Alina Tugend is a columnist for the New York Times and the author of Better by Mistake: The
Unexpected Benefits of Being Wrong (2011). Her work has also appeared in the Los Angeles
Times, the Atlantic, Family Circle, and the American Journalism Review, as well as in anthologies
and online magazines. This report on multitasking was published in the New York Times in 2008.
______________
AS you are reading this article, 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, weve accepted multitasking without question. Virtually all of us spend
part or most of our day either rapidly switching from one task to another or 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.
Although doing many things at the same time reading an article while listening to
music, switching to check e-mail messages and talking on the phone can be a way of making
tasks more fun and energizing, you have to keep in mind that you sacrifice focus when you do
this, said Edward M. Hallowell, a psychiatrist and author of CrazyBusy: Overstretched,
Overbooked, and About to Snap! (Ballantine, 2006). Multitasking is shifting focus from one
task to another in rapid succession. It gives the illusion that were simultaneously tasking, but
were really not. Its like playing tennis with three balls.
Of course, it depends what youre doing. For some people, listening to music while
working actually makes them more creative because they are using different cognitive
functions.
But despite what many of us think, you cannot simultaneously e-mail and talk on the
phone. I think were all familiar with what Dr. Hallowell calls e-mail voice, when someone
youre talking to on the phone suddenly sounds, well, disengaged.
You cannot divide your attention like that, he said. Its a big illusion. You can shift
back and forth.
We all know that computers and their spawn, the smartphone and cellphone, have
created a very different world from several decades ago, when a desk worker had a typewriter,
a phone and an occasional colleague who dropped into the office.
Think even of the days before the cordless phone. Those old enough can remember
when talking on the telephone, which was stationary, meant sitting down, putting your feet up
and chatting not doing laundry, cooking dinner, sweeping the floor and answering the door.
That is so far in the past. As we are required, or feel required, to do more and more
things in a shorter period of time, researchers are trying to figure out how the brain changes
attention from one subject to another.
Earl Miller, the Picower professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, explained it this way: human brains have a very large prefrontal cortex, which is
the part of the brain that contains the executive control process. This helps us switch and
prioritize tasks.
In humans, he said, the prefrontal cortex is about one-third of the entire cortex, while in
dogs and cats, it is 4 or 5 percent and in monkeys about 15 percent.
With the growth of the prefrontal cortex, animals become more and more flexible in
their behavior, Professor Miller said.
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 said.
Professor Miller conducted studies where electrodes were attached to the head to
monitor participants performing different tasks.
He found that when theres a bunch of visual stimulants out there in front of you, only
one or two things tend to activate your neurons, indicating that were really only focusing on
one or two items at a time.
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 were talking about doing two jobs that can require real concentration, like
text-messaging and driving, it can be fatal.
The RAC Foundation, a British nonprofit organization that focuses on driving issues,
asked 17 drivers, age 17 to 24, to use a driving simulator to see how texting affected driving.
The reaction time was around 35 percent slower when writing a text message slower
than driving drunk or stoned.
All right, there are definitely times we should not try to multitask. But, we may think, its
nice to say that we should focus on one thing at a time, but the real world doesnt work that
way. We are constantly interrupted.
A 2005 study, No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work, found
that people were interrupted and moved from one project to another about every 11 minutes.
And each time, it took about 25 minutes to circle back to that same project.
Interestingly, a study published last April, The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed
and Stress, found that people actually worked faster in conditions where they were
interrupted, but they produced less, said Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the
University of California at Irvine and a co-author of both studies. And she also found that
people were as likely to self-interrupt as to be interrupted by someone else.
As observers, well watch, and then after every 12 minutes or so, for no apparent
reasons, someone working on a document will turn and call someone or e-mail, she said. As I
read that, I realized how often I was switching between writing this article and checking my e-
mail.
Professor Mark said further research needed to be done to know why people work in
these patterns, but our increasingly shorter attention spans probably have something to do
with it.
Her study found that after only 20 minutes of interrupted performance, people reported
significantly higher stress, frustration, workload, effort and pressure.
I also argue that its bad for innovation, she said. Ten and a half minutes on one
project is not enough time to think in-depth about anything.
Dr. Hallowell has termed this effort to multitask attention deficit trait. Unlike
attention deficit disorder, which he has studied for years and has a neurological basis, attention
deficit trait springs entirely from the environment, he wrote in a 2005 Harvard Business
Review article, Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform.
As our minds fill with noise feckless synaptic events signifying nothing the brain
gradually loses its capacity to attend fully and gradually to anything, he wrote. Desperately
trying to keep up with a multitude of jobs, we feel a constant low level of panic and guilt.
But Dr. Hallowell says that despite our belief that we cannot control how much were
overloaded, we can.
We need to recreate boundaries, he said. That means training yourself not to look at
your BlackBerry every 20 seconds, or turning off your cellphone. 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.
So the next time the phone rings and a good friend is on the line, try this trick: Sit on the
couch. Focus on the conversation. Dont jump up, no matter how much you feel the need to
clean the kitchen. It seems weird, but stick with it. You, too, can learn the art of single-tasking.
Citation:
Tugend, Alina. Multitasking Can Make You Lose … Um … Focus. New York Times, 24 Oct.
2008. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/25/business/yourmoney/25shortcuts.html.
Reading the Text
1. According to Alina Tugend’s research, what are the effects of multi-tasking? Tugend doesn’t
say much about the causes of this practice. Why do you think she doesn’t treat causes? What
do you think are the causes for multitasking?
2. How well does Tugend maintain a tight focus on her topic in this report? Given the claim she
makes in her title, why might a tightly focused topic be important for helping readers
understand the issue?
3. Tugend defines several terms in her report. Locate one or more of the key terms she defines
and discuss what these definitions contribute to this report.
4. What is Tugend’s stance toward the practice of multitasking? Point out specific phrases that
reveal her attitude. How appropriate is her stance, given her subject matter?
Multitasking Can Make You Lose … Um … Focus
