I wonder what this says about pair programming, given that writing code and communicating are pretty different tasks, according to imaging: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-12-brain-code-decipher-n...
Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)
71–80 of 303 posts
Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think what you say is true over the long term, but not so much over the short term. Need me to skip breaks and work hours for one day when I'm well rested. I definitely can be significantly more productive than usual. Problem is that it's not sustainable.
It took me over 15 years in the industry to realize a couple of things. If you're young and reading this then I hope you at least spend a few minutes thinking deeply about it. 1) Any productivity gained over that one-or-two-day session makes very little difference in the big picture. Even a week. A company/product/feature is never going to live or die on that 30 hours of coding that you managed to squeeze into 48 hou…
This. So much this.
At my company, we give out "values awards". People are frequently lauded for working late evenings and weekends. Everytime this happens, I cringe. If people feel they need to do this, it's a sign that projects were under-resourced or the deadlines were too tight.
At this point in my career, I am so much more comfortable saying "no" to upper management.
"My team does not have capacity for this" "ok, which piece of work do you want us to drop?" "Yep, we can do that... next year"
Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)
#73Again and again, people just refuse to accept that cognitive performance has very clear limits, and that multitasking, skipped breaks and long hours are, at best, a total waste of time. And exponentially so, the more “focus-intensive” the work is. Why do we have this bias? Is it deeply wired in some sort of survival instinct?
>> Again and again, people just refuse to accept that cognitive performance has very clear limits, and that multitasking, skipped breaks and long hours are, at best, a total waste of time
These studies are non-ergodic. I work best under long hours; have tried both. The real proof in the pudding is the fact that many of my competitors work "efficient" work weeks and get buried under the onslaught of hours I work.
For surgical things like programming and software development, I'll readily admit that working 80 hours/week is not ideal. But for management and a wide-ranging entrepreneur, I strongly suspect the opposite is true.
Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)
#74Again and again, people just refuse to accept that cognitive performance has very clear limits, and that multitasking, skipped breaks and long hours are, at best, a total waste of time. And exponentially so, the more “focus-intensive” the work is. Why do we have this bias? Is it deeply wired in some sort of survival instinct?
Because people with money don't care how many humans they burn through while building their empire. In the short term there are productivity improvements to be had, and long term the burned out components of the big machine just get replaced.
Cue the counterpoints of "I love to hustle". Sure you do, until you come down with burnout, a mental health issue, failed relationship, etc.
Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds more like entertainment or leisure time, so I don't know how important "processing any of it" really is. Giving a detailed report about what happened certainly doesn't seem to be a goal, and I don't see why it ought to be. If you're trying to relax or be entertained, and you are succeeding, that seems fine to me.
Sure, but that has nothing to do with why I wrote my comment. It's fine for people to spend their leisure time however they want. If you want to focus on a single thing like reading a book, or sit in a room in quiet contemplation, or turn on every electronic in your house, I don't care. I'm just curious if the latter is really the same as multi-tasking. It's reasonable to question if having a lot of sensory input thr…
I would say it's not. To me, multi-tasking implies you're completing a task, you have a set goal in mind with a series of steps or focused work required to achieve the goal or end result of the task.
Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)
#76> So the next time you're writing your boss an email during a meeting, remember that your cognitive capacity is being diminished to the point that you might as well let an 8-year-old write it for you. Yeah, no. Stick to the paper and stop trying to sensationalize it, please.
Joke's on them I never focused in on the meeting
Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)
#77My wife (like many wives) multi-tasks to the extreme. Coordinating our household, and running a business means she always has about 100 things in her brain at once. Always on her phone, always planning, making lists, researching, ordering. It's certainly common, and a wonder to witness however I worry about the effects on her brain, as she has trouble sometimes vocalizing her thoughts. She often forgets someone's nam…
I wonder if it is a biological thing. My wife excels at multitasking but I can barely do two things at a time. I did notice the delayed speech with my wife as well.
I'd hope not as I'm good at it, but my wife is awful at it. She pauses the TV to read a text message.
Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)
#78Genuine question then.. how are we supposed to function properly as software engineers, especially in jobs with long feedback loops? The nature of my job is that I'm almost more of a train conductor than a software engineer. I configure a job, run it, then wait for 10-30 minutes to get the results. I do this for maybe 5 jobs at a time, on 5 different projects. Naturally I feel a lot of stress and cognitive burden whi…
Multitasking in this context means doing multiple things concurrently, not consecutively. It may be hard to launch a job, switch over to configure another one, switch back when you get the results from the first, finish launching the second, reconfigure & relaunch the first, and then move on to the third while 1 & 2 are running etc etc etc... but it's not strictly multitasking, it's just ocntext switching.
Also hard, also expensive, just different.
Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably because work culture was originally not knowledge/cognitive based, and the expectations were based on human endurance of physical expenditure, which has different load bearing characteristics.
I’d rather say: On passion. Since I’m 13, I’ve always programmed in long stretches, by passion. It’s please to absorbe oneself into a problem and solve it. Not saying it’s healthy, just saying it’s rooted in our human form, not in workplace traditions.
Do you find it's easy for you to head back into work at 9 am the next day? I'll have boughts, but they leave me drained and needing to recharge. I can't do it consistently, especially if the work isn't exciting.
Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)
#80Again and again, people just refuse to accept that cognitive performance has very clear limits, and that multitasking, skipped breaks and long hours are, at best, a total waste of time. And exponentially so, the more “focus-intensive” the work is. Why do we have this bias? Is it deeply wired in some sort of survival instinct?
> multitasking, skipped breaks and long hours From personal experience I think these are two very different things. Context switching seems to me to have a cost directly proportional to the complexity of the task. If it takes me 10 minutes to get the mental model of something sorted and then I'm interrupted I'll lose most of that 10 minutes. I can fire off emails requiring little thought one after the other with litt…
> I can fire off emails requiring little thought one after the other with little cost.
So can everyone else, which results in the state of the average modern inbox.