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Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)

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Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)

#91

Post by yonaguska »

periheli0n wrote: post #51
athenot wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would much rather code for 3 days non stop and then take a 4 day break doing some outdoors activity. I think the "business hours" schedule is fantastic for meetings to discuss but terrible for creative work. The catch is than in many positions, one needs to blend these 2 modes of operation. Some collaboration, some deep work. Unless there's support throughout the organization, what ends up suffering is the deep wor…

The problem is also that meetings and answering emails is much easier than deep work and therefore they are highly attractive procrastination pastimes.

Ugh. I find them incredibly draining. While if I can actually code for a few hours uninterrupted (this includes self interruption), I find I have so much more energy. Maybe it's the self congratulatory mind manipulation I play on myself when I'm productive. On the other hand, meetings that I have little stake in just exhaust me and derail my ability to focus for the entire day. This may be an ADHD thing though.

Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)

#92

Post by ZephyrBlu »

0xFACEFEED wrote: post #58
nicoburns wrote: post #10

Earlier 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…

I understand the premise of what you're saying, but I also feel like you're downplaying the upside:

> It didn't help that I was rewarded with more money, more respect, and more decision making power. I was even rewarded with more knowledge than everyone else -- you learn a lot working 12 hours a day. And if you screw something up you have plenty of time to fix it

Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)

#93

Post by tracyhenry »

LZ_Khan wrote: post #43

Genuine 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…

Have you tried to alert yourself when a long-running job finishes? I know it might exacerbate context switching, but it often feels bad to know that a job has finished long long ago and that I've been playing my phone without knowing it.

A relevant HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26259007

Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)

#94

Post by lordnacho »

andrewstuart wrote: post #11

My primary school age son, and anecdotally, lots of other kids of similar age, relentlessly multitask in ways that hurts my brain just to think about. He literally is playing a game, watching a YouTube video in another screen, and talking to friends at the same time, and in the most extreme case, is even listening to an audiobook or podcast as well. Asking kids about it, they all say that's just what they do and look…

What about school itself? Why is it that you go for 45 minutes of English, then math, then French, then art, and PE?

Strikes me as the worst context switching waste imaginable.

Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)

#95

Post by Jiocus »

mapcars wrote: post #48

This is not true, there are yogis who can do dozens and even hundreds things at the same time. These researchers study people who never did any work on their mind and make statements about whole humanity.

Are you telling me these people don't need Kubernetes engineering in their operations and still deliver value to their clients?

Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)

#96

Post by ratherbefuddled »

sokoloff wrote: post #80
ratherbefuddled wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, it's a sorry state of affairs. I'd escaped that sort of thing until recently when we started working with a client who behaves as though everybody lives in their inbox and sees emails seconds after they're sent. Explaining to them that I look maybe twice a day at emails was interesting.

Slack is my problem. I'm trying to train myself to be disciplined but too many people treat it as synchronous.

Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)

#97

Post by wombatmobile »

0xFACEFEED wrote: post #58
nicoburns wrote: post #10

Earlier 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…

It's interesting to read so many comments against marathon sessions.

I can't imagine reading the same set of comments 20 years ago (when I was young and a frequent marathoner, as were my teammates).

Is this indicative of a cultural shift in the industry?

Or collective learning?

Or might it just be that no 20 somethings are commenting here and it's just a sample bias resulting from older commentators?

Do 20 something developers today feel that marathoning is a wasted effort, or do they tend to think it is the best way to get things done?

BTW I think I would agree with the comments now, but even 10 years ago I might have been dismissive.

Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)

#98

Post by godot »

0xFACEFEED wrote: post #58
nicoburns wrote: post #10

Earlier 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…

I will preface this by saying I agree with you.

However, I'd like to point out (as someone else did too about downplaying the upside) -- if you did get rewarded with money, respect, promotions (decision making power), knowledge -- these are all real material gains from those long hours. True, from the business point of view, your extra hours didn't matter to the business in the long run. It did matter for your career though. In fact, if you happened to work for a growing unicorn, and you gained those rewards and promotions with those long hours, you may even have made lifechanging money from unicorn equity, from those long hours.

Which, comes back to the point, this is unhealthy and somewhat toxic (the fact that putting in long hours gain you those things, i.e. it encourages people to do so).

Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)

#99

Post by mapcars »

Jiocus wrote: post #95
mapcars wrote: post #48

This is not true, there are yogis who can do dozens and even hundreds things at the same time. These researchers study people who never did any work on their mind and make statements about whole humanity.

Are you telling me these people don't need Kubernetes engineering in their operations and still deliver value to their clients?

Well, even in my company we don't have Kubernetes. I'm not a devops so can't elaborate more on this one :)

Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)

#100

Post by zeristor »

TameAntelope wrote: post #18

> A study at the University of London found that participants who multitasked during cognitive tasks experienced IQ score declines that were similar to what they'd expect if they had smoked marijuana or stayed up all night. Does anyone know which study this is?

University of London just sounds a bit wonky, a reputable UoL college such as: UCL, King’s QMW, SoAS, LSE, or Birkbeck would be recognisable by name.

Imperial was part of UoL until 2007.

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