I must be brain dead because I have been in multitasking mode for a decade with small months of hyper focus sprints. Sadly a modern life brings many opportunities. I know for sure the Internet has made my focus a challenge.....
Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)
21–30 of 303 posts
Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)
#22Again 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?
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.
Most coders I know have had occasional run ins with a rabbit hole where several days of their life got sucked into a single drawn out coding session with little breaks besides food, and had some of the most productive few days of their lives doing that.
If you need me to do a three day sprint, I'm going to accomplish the most without any breaks and with very sporadic sleep. (typically when doing a multi day session my sleep happens 30-120 minutes at a time, usually immediately following me hitting a difficult problem that requires intense rumination)
Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)
#23My 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…
I've noticed the exact same thing. My son will constantly be doing multiple things at once -- watch a youtube video while playing a game, etc.
Although when I was a kid a literally did everything with the TV on in the background.
Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)
#24Again 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 little cost.
I find that working long hours/without breaks is completely trainable. I can do it productively for long lengths of time and the longer I do it the easier it gets. It's very tiring, and requires solid rest in between but it can be done and it can be very productive.
The intersection of the two is impossible for me. Interruptions seem to accelerate the slowly building fatigue markedly. It's as though almost all the effort goes into getting the mental model sorted and staying there is relatively cheap.
Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)
#25Again 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?
It's just that, from a evolutionary standpoint, the kind of work that we do nowadays, is totally unnatural.
So it's not strange that we have chaotic behaviors.
Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)
#26Again 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?
Which bias, the bias to want to multi-task? It's not a bias, we're just stupid. We think we can do multiple things at once. And we can do multiple things at once, so our stupid brains have proof that we can multitask.
The problem is that humans can't objectively qualify their own results without analysis, and we don't do rigorous scientific analysis on ourselves regularly, so we have no idea when something we do is shit or not. The only facility we have for that is comparison and pattern recognition, which is not rigorous analysis. If you don't go out of your way to compare your results as a multi-tasker to the cumulative qualitative results of somebody else doing two different things, you will never see that multi-tasking is worse.
Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)
#27Maybe I'm just refusing to let go of a useful tool, but how many tasks do I really need to do at an above-8-yr-old level?
It could be perfectly acceptable to apply 15 fewer IQ points across the board to my problems if I can get more of those problems solved in a fixed amount of time.
Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)
#28My 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…
It would be interesting to see how much of all that information is actually retained. I bet kids are much better at filtering out background noise than grown-ups are.
Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)
#29My 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…
Why be in a single state of flow when you can dip into and cycle through multiple flow states simultaneously. Only saying this semi-sarcastically. There is a kind of janky skill of knowing how to allocate attention while 'multiconsuming', but I'd be wary of doing it for anything that matters/multitasking simply because you start wading into the risk of unknown-unknowns territory, when you ignore crucial potentially info
Re: Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)
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