Tag Archives: multi-tasking

Are You Monotasking or Just Paying Attention?

We have indeed reached the era of peak multi-tasking. It’s time to select a different corporate meme.

Study after recent study shows that multi-tasking is an illusion — we can’t perform two or more cognitive tasks in parallel, at the same time. Rather, we timeshare: dividing our attention from one task to another sequentially. These studies also show that dividing our attention in this way tends to have a deleterious effect on all of the tasks. I say cognitive tasks because it’s rather obvious that we can all perform some tasks at the same time: walk and chew gum (or thumb a smartphone); drive and sing; shower and think; read and eat. But, all of these combinations require that one of these tasks is mostly autonomic. That is, we perform one task without conscious effort.

Yet more social scientists have determined that multi-tasking is a fraud — perhaps perpetuated by corporate industrial engineers convinced that they can wring more hours of work from you.

What are we to do now having learned that our super-efficient world of juggling numerous tasks as the “same time” is nothing but a mirage?

Well, observers of the fragile human condition have not rested. This time social scientists have discovered an amazing human talent. And they’ve coined a mesmerizing new term, known as monotasking. In some circles it’s called uni-tasking or single-tasking.

When I was growing up this was called “paying attention”.

But, this being the era of self-help-life-experience-consulting gone mad and sub-minute attention spans (fueled by multi-tasking) we can now all eagerly await the rise of an entirely new industry dedicated to this wonderful monotasking breakthrough. Expect a whole host of monotasking books, buzzworthy news articles, daytime TV shows with monotasking tips and personal coaching experts at TED events armed with “look what monotasking can do for you” powerpoint decks.

Personally, I will quietly retreat, and return to old-school staying focused, and remind my kids to do the same.

From NYT:

Stop what you’re doing.

Well, keep reading. Just stop everything else that you’re doing.

Mute your music. Turn off your television. Put down your sandwich and ignore that text message. While you’re at it, put your phone away entirely. (Unless you’re reading this on your phone. In which case, don’t. But the other rules still apply.)

Just read.

You are now monotasking.

Maybe this doesn’t feel like a big deal. Doing one thing at a time isn’t a new idea.

Indeed, multitasking, that bulwark of anemic résumés everywhere, has come under fire in recent years. A 2014 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that interruptions as brief as two to three seconds — which is to say, less than the amount of time it would take you to toggle from this article to your email and back again — were enough to double the number of errors participants made in an assigned task.

Earlier research out of Stanford revealed that self-identified “high media multitaskers” are actually more easily distracted than those who limit their time toggling.

So, in layman’s terms, by doing more you’re getting less done.

But monotasking, also referred to as single-tasking or unitasking, isn’t just about getting things done.

Not the same as mindfulness, which focuses on emotional awareness, monotasking is a 21st-century term for what your high school English teacher probably just called “paying attention.”

“It’s a digital literacy skill,” said Manoush Zomorodi, the host and managing editor of WNYC Studios’ “Note to Self” podcast, which recently offered a weeklong interactive series called Infomagical, addressing the effects of information overload. “Our gadgets and all the things we look at on them are designed to not let us single-task. We weren’t talking about this before because we simply weren’t as distracted.”

Continue reading the main story

Ms. Zomorodi prefers the term “single-tasking”: “ ‘Monotasking’ seemed boring to me. It sounds like ‘monotonous.’ ”

Kelly McGonigal, a psychologist, lecturer at Stanford and the author of “The Willpower Instinct,” believes that monotasking is “something that needs to be practiced.” She said: “It’s an important ability and a form of self-awareness as opposed to a cognitive limitation.”

Read the entire article here.

Image courtesy of Google Search.

The Power of Mediocrity

Over-achievers may well frown upon the slacking mediocre souls who strive to do less. But, mediocrity has a way of pervading the lives of the constantly striving 18 hour-a-day, multi-taskers as well. The figure of speech “jack of all trades, master of none”, sums up the inevitability of mediocrity for those who strive to do everything, but do nothing well. In fact, pursuit of the mediocre may well be an immutable universal law — both for under-archievers and over-archievers, and for that vast, second-rate, mediocre middle-ground of averageness.

From the Guardian:

In the early years of the last century, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gassetproposed a solution to society’s ills that still strikes me as ingenious, in a deranged way. He argued that all public sector workers from the top down (though, come to think of it, why not everyone else, too?) should be demoted to the level beneath their current job. His reasoning foreshadowed the Peter Principle: in hierarchies, people “rise to their level of incompetence”. Do your job well, and you’re rewarded with promotion, until you reach a job you’re less good at, where you remain.

In a recent book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, the tech investor Ben Horowitz adds a twist: “The Law of Crappy People”. As soon as someone on a given rung at a company gets as good as the worst person the next rung up, he or she may expect a promotion. Yet, if it’s granted, the firm’s talent levels will gradually slide downhill. No one person need be peculiarly crappy for this to occur; bureaucracies just tend to be crappier than the sum of their parts.

Yet it’s wrong to think of these pitfalls as restricted to organisations. There’s a case to be made that the gravitational pull of the mediocre affects all life – as John Stuart Mill put it, that “the general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind”. True, it’s most obvious in the workplace (hence the observation that “a meeting moves at the pace of the slowest mind in the room”), but the broader point is that in any domain – work, love, friendship, health – crappy solutions crowd out good ones time after time, so long as they’re not so bad as to destroy the system. People and organisations hit plateaux not because they couldn’t do better, but because a plateau is a tolerable, even comfortable place. Even evolution – life itself! – is all about mediocrity. “Survival of the fittest” isn’t a progression towards greatness; it just means the survival of the sufficiently non-terrible.

And mediocrity is cunning: it can disguise itself as achievement. The cliche of a “mediocre” worker is a Dilbert-esque manager with little to do. But as Greg McKeown notes, in his book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit Of Less, the busyness of the go-getter can lead to mediocrity, too. Throw yourself at every opportunity and you’ll end up doing unimportant stuff – and badly. You can’t fight this with motivational tricks or cheesy mission statements: you need a discipline, a rule you apply daily, to counter the pull of the sub-par. For a company, that might mean stricter, more objective promotion policies. For the over-busy person, there’s McKeown’s “90% Rule” – when considering an option, ask: does it score at least 9/10 on some relevant criterion? If not, say no. (Ideally, that criterion is: “Is this fulfilling?”, but the rule still works if it’s “Does this pay the bills?”).

Read the entire story here.

Media Multi-Tasking, School Work and Poor Memory

It’s official — teens can’t stay off social media for more than 15 minutes. It’s no secret that many kids aged between 8 and 18 spend most of their time texting, tweeting and checking their real-time social status. The profound psychological and sociological consequences of this behavior will only start to become apparent ten to fifteen year from now. In the meantime, researchers are finding a general degradation in kids’ memory skills from using social media and multi-tasking while studying.

From Slate:

Living rooms, dens, kitchens, even bedrooms: Investigators followed students into the spaces where homework gets done. Pens poised over their “study observation forms,” the observers watched intently as the students—in middle school, high school, and college, 263 in all—opened their books and turned on their computers.

For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University–Dominguez Hills, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they studied. A checklist on the form included: reading a book, writing on paper, typing on the computer—and also using email, looking at Facebook, engaging in instant messaging, texting, talking on the phone, watching television, listening to music, surfing the Web. Sitting unobtrusively at the back of the room, the observers counted the number of windows open on the students’ screens and noted whether the students were wearing earbuds.

Although the students had been told at the outset that they should “study something important, including homework, an upcoming examination or project, or reading a book for a course,” it wasn’t long before their attention drifted: Students’ “on-task behavior” started declining around the two-minute mark as they began responding to arriving texts or checking their Facebook feeds. By the time the 15 minutes were up, they had spent only about 65 percent of the observation period actually doing their schoolwork.

“We were amazed at how frequently they multitasked, even though they knew someone was watching,” Rosen says. “It really seems that they could not go for 15 minutes without engaging their devices,” adding, “It was kind of scary, actually.”

Concern about young people’s use of technology is nothing new, of course. But Rosen’s study, published in the May issue of Computers in Human Behavior, is part of a growing body of research focused on a very particular use of technology: media multitasking while learning. Attending to multiple streams of information and entertainment while studying, doing homework, or even sitting in class has become common behavior among young people—so common that many of them rarely write a paper or complete a problem set any other way.

But evidence from psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience suggests that when students multitask while doing schoolwork, their learning is far spottier and shallower than if the work had their full attention. They understand and remember less, and they have greater difficulty transferring their learning to new contexts. So detrimental is this practice that some researchers are proposing that a new prerequisite for academic and even professional success—the new marshmallow test of self-discipline—is the ability to resist a blinking inbox or a buzzing phone.

The media multitasking habit starts early. In “Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds,” a survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and published in 2010, almost a third of those surveyed said that when they were doing homework, “most of the time” they were also watching TV, texting, listening to music, or using some other medium. The lead author of the study was Victoria Rideout, then a vice president at Kaiser and now an independent research and policy consultant. Although the study looked at all aspects of kids’ media use, Rideout told me she was particularly troubled by its findings regarding media multitasking while doing schoolwork.

“This is a concern we should have distinct from worrying about how much kids are online or how much kids are media multitasking overall. It’s multitasking while learning that has the biggest potential downside,” she says. “I don’t care if a kid wants to tweet while she’s watching American Idol, or have music on while he plays a video game. But when students are doing serious work with their minds, they have to have focus.”

For older students, the media multitasking habit extends into the classroom. While most middle and high school students don’t have the opportunity to text, email, and surf the Internet during class, studies show the practice is nearly universal among students in college and professional school. One large survey found that 80 percent of college students admit to texting during class; 15 percent say they send 11 or more texts in a single class period.

During the first meeting of his courses, Rosen makes a practice of calling on a student who is busy with his phone. “I ask him, ‘What was on the slide I just showed to the class?’ The student always pulls a blank,” Rosen reports. “Young people have a wildly inflated idea of how many things they can attend to at once, and this demonstration helps drive the point home: If you’re paying attention to your phone, you’re not paying attention to what’s going on in class.” Other professors have taken a more surreptitious approach, installing electronic spyware or planting human observers to record whether students are taking notes on their laptops or using them for other, unauthorized purposes.

Read the entire article here.

Image courtesy of Examiner.

Childhood Injuries on the Rise: Blame Parental Texting

The long-term downward trend in the number injuries to young children is no longer. Sadly, urgent care and emergency room doctors are now seeing more children aged 0-14 years with unintentional injuries. While the exact causes are yet to be determined, there is a growing body of anecdotal evidence that points to distraction among patents and supervisors — it’s the texting stupid!

The great irony is that should your child suffer an injury while you were using your smartphone, you’ll be able to contact the emergency room much more quickly now — courtesy of the very same smartphone.

[div class=attrib]From the Wall Street Journal:[end-div]

One sunny July afternoon in a San Francisco park, tech recruiter Phil Tirapelle was tapping away on his cellphone while walking with his 18-month-old son. As he was texting his wife, his son wandered off in front of a policeman who was breaking up a domestic dispute.

“I was looking down at my mobile, and the police officer was looking forward,” and his son “almost got trampled over,” he says. “One thing I learned is that multitasking makes you dumber.”

Yet a few minutes after the incident, he still had his phone out. “I’m a hypocrite. I admit it,” he says. “We all are.”

Is high-tech gadgetry diminishing the ability of adults to give proper supervision to very young children? Faced with an unending litany of newly proclaimed threats to their kids, harried parents might well roll their eyes at this suggestion. But many emergency-room doctors are worried: They see the growing use of hand-held electronic devices as a plausible explanation for the surprising reversal of a long slide in injury rates for young children. There have even been a few extreme cases of death and near drowning.

Nonfatal injuries to children under age five rose 12% between 2007 and 2010, after falling for much of the prior decade, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based on emergency-room records. The number of Americans 13 and older who own a smartphone such as an iPhone or BlackBerry has grown from almost 9 million in mid-2007, when Apple introduced its device, to 63 million at the end of 2010 and 114 million in July 2012, according to research firm comScore.

Child-safety experts say injury rates had been declining since at least the 1970s, thanks to everything from safer playgrounds to baby gates on staircases to fences around backyard swimming pools. “It was something we were always fairly proud of,” says Dr. Jeffrey Weiss, a pediatrician at Phoenix Children’s Hospital who serves on an American Academy of Pediatrics working group for injury, violence and poison prevention. “The injuries were going down and down and down.” The recent uptick, he says, is “pretty striking.”

Childhood-injury specialists say there appear to be no formal studies or statistics to establish a connection between so-called device distraction and childhood injury. “What you have is an association,” says Dr. Gary Smith, founder and director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy of the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. “Being able to prove causality is the issue…. It certainly is a question that begs to be asked.”

It is well established that using a smartphone while driving or even crossing a street increases the risk of accident. More than a dozen pediatricians, emergency-room physicians, academic researchers and police interviewed by The Wall Street Journal say that a similar factor could be at play in injuries to young children.

“It’s very well understood within the emergency-medicine community that utilizing devices—hand-held devices—while you are assigned to watch your kids—that resulting injuries could very well be because you are utilizing those tools,” says Dr. Wally Ghurabi, medical director of the emergency center at the Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital.

Adds Dr. Rahul Rastogi, an emergency-room physician at Kaiser Permanente in Oregon: “We think we’re multitasking and not really feeling like we are truly distracted. But in reality we are.”

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of Science Daily.[end-div]

Our Kids’ Glorious New Age of Distraction

[div class=attrib]From Slate:[end-div]

Children are not what they used to be. They tweet and blog and text without batting an eyelash. Whenever they need the answer to a question, they simply log onto their phone and look it up on Google. They live in a state of perpetual, endless distraction, and, for many parents and educators, it’s a source of real concern. Will future generations be able to finish a whole book? Will they be able to sit through an entire movie without checking their phones? Are we raising a generation of impatient brats?

According to Cathy N. Davidson, a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Duke University, and the author of the new book “Now You See It: How Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn,” much of the panic about children’s shortened attention spans isn’t just misguided, it’s harmful. Younger generations, she argues, don’t just think about technology more casually, they’re actually wired to respond to it in a different manner than we are, and it’s up to us — and our education system — to catch up to them.

Davidson is personally invested in finding a solution to the problem. As vice provost at Duke, she spearheaded a project to hand out a free iPod to every member of the incoming class, and began using wikis and blogs as part of her teaching. In a move that garnered national media attention, she crowd-sourced the grading in her course. In her book, she explains how everything from video gaming to redesigned schools can enhance our children’s education — and ultimately, our future.

Salon spoke to Davidson over the phone about the structure of our brains, the danger of multiple-choice testing, and what the workplace of the future will actually look like.

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of Wikipedia / Creative Commons.[end-div]