Multitasking

Several decades ago I taught a values clarification class for Santa Clara University. Then, as I thought about the concept and prepared for the class, my own values were clarified. So it may be with the idea of ‘multitasking.’ Day by day I’m becoming more clarified on this phenomenon, and consequently day by day I find I’m swimming upstream with current culture but fortunately, now, more downstream with the validation of current science. Let me clarify.

Many, facing the challenges of the current generation, take it for granted that with the technology available to them it is necessary or desirable or even de rigueur to attend to several things at once. Consequently we have young people texting in church, talking on the cell-phone while driving, watching television on a split screen while information bars are streaming data below the visual images, playing video games while doing homework, and listening to music while doing everything.

Though simultaneous processing abilities may be fine for computers, and occasionally necessary, but to a much more limited extent than we sometimes realize, science is finding—as wise people have known for decades—that it can be counterproductive and even harmful for people when carried too far.

Prescient Eighteenth Century thinker Lord Chesterfield wrote this advice to one of his sons: “There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.” That may, perhaps, be overstated, but is confirmed by one of the smartest men of all time, Isaac Newton, who, when asked about his particular genius, responded that when he had made any discoveries, it was “owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.” And William James, the eminent Nineteenth Century psychologist, wrote in Principles of Psychology echoing Lord Chesterfield’s observations, that the transition from youthful distraction to mature attention was in large part the result of personal mastery and discipline—and so was illustrative of character. “The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again,” he wrote, “is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”

In addition to these philosophical observations, numerous scientific studies are now showing the dangers of multitasking or diluting one’s attention. For example, it has now been confirmed that:

Overall I.Q. performance (clear thinking) is markedly lessened when people try to attend to too many things as once.

Personal relationships such as marriage, parenting, even friendships, suffer when one or both of the parties are distracted or attending to more than the person at hand.

Workplace productivity is diminished. Discussing multitasking with the New York Times in 2007, Jonathan B. Spira, an analyst at the business research firm Basex, estimated that extreme multitasking costs the U.S. economy $650 billion a year in lost productivity.

Related to the above is an increase in automobile and industrial accidents when people are distracted by electronic devices and are attending to more than the task at hand.

In my area of expertise, sports performance, the ability to fully attend to one thing—the task at hand—and eliminate the past, the future, and all distractions is often the thing that separates the winner from the also-ran.

As a result of these and other accumulating data, best-selling business advice author Timothy Ferriss warns of the dangers of multitasking and makes a strong case for “single-tasking” in his book, The 4-Hour Workweek.

To rest my point, Christine Rosen, senior editor of The New Atlantis magazine, wrote in “The Myth of Multitasking,” “that given what neuroscience and anecdotal evidence have shown us, this state of constant intentional self-distraction could well be of profound detriment to individual and cultural well-being. When people do their work only in the ‘interstices of their mind-wandering,’ with crumbs of attention rationed out among many competing tasks, their culture may gain in information, but it will surely weaken in wisdom.”

That is something to think about.