Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018) • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by wlll » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:16 PM UTC

ganzuul wrote: post #289

wlll wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you aware of the reason why you are doing this? Have you examined your reasoning as thoroughly as the faces of your children seem to tell you? What? It's simple isn't it? Multitasking doesn't work, all having these things on in the background will do is distract from the homework they need to do. This is literally a comment on an article about how multitasking doesn't work. > Do parts of your body feel numb? Wh…

No, it isn't simple at all. You described yourself as extremely self-centered and you didn't seem to notice that you did so. I'm wondering if you are one of those people who seem to only ever use the left side of their brain. You can function in the role of a father in this mode but don't expect your kids to take care of you when you're old if you never respect their opinions and desires. I'm reaching out to you beca…

Calm down, I tell them not to watch Netflix or YouTube while they're concentrating on their homework because it will affect their ability to concentrate. It's not some sort of police state. They lead happy fulfilled lives in general, and being told to not do those things isn't making a material difference to that.

Respecting people's opinions or desires doesn't mean letting them do anything they want, and not letting them do one fucking thing doesn't mean that "you never respect their opinions and desires". They're kids, they need structure, guidance and protection. You can let your kids do whatever the fuck they want wether it's good for them or not, let me know how that works out.

Your weird obsession with this, and your writing make you sound like a complete fucking weirdo.

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

#292

Post by throwaway58670 » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

shakaijin wrote: post #177

I have been noticing the impact of excessive multitasking on myself lately, and I am now actively trying to avoid it. At first i thought that multitasking would increase my overall efficiency by filling in gaps of downtime in certain tasks, but it soon turned me into a person incapable of focusing on anything deeply. One day, I noticed that I am unable to read a book the same way i did as a child (cover to cover in o…

Highly recommend "The Shallows". (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9778945-the-shallows) It's a book about our brains becoming shallow, incapable of deep processes like reading a book.

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

#293

Post by posed » Thu, May 06, 2021, 6:11 PM UTC

ganzuul wrote: post #289

wlll wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you aware of the reason why you are doing this? Have you examined your reasoning as thoroughly as the faces of your children seem to tell you? What? It's simple isn't it? Multitasking doesn't work, all having these things on in the background will do is distract from the homework they need to do. This is literally a comment on an article about how multitasking doesn't work. > Do parts of your body feel numb? Wh…

No, it isn't simple at all. You described yourself as extremely self-centered and you didn't seem to notice that you did so. I'm wondering if you are one of those people who seem to only ever use the left side of their brain. You can function in the role of a father in this mode but don't expect your kids to take care of you when you're old if you never respect their opinions and desires. I'm reaching out to you beca…

Wow, you judged the whole character of a person by a single incident in their life. Great.

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

#294

Post by posed » Thu, May 06, 2021, 6:14 PM UTC

wlll wrote: post #291

ganzuul wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it isn't simple at all. You described yourself as extremely self-centered and you didn't seem to notice that you did so. I'm wondering if you are one of those people who seem to only ever use the left side of their brain. You can function in the role of a father in this mode but don't expect your kids to take care of you when you're old if you never respect their opinions and desires. I'm reaching out to you beca…

Calm down, I tell them not to watch Netflix or YouTube while they're concentrating on their homework because it will affect their ability to concentrate. It's not some sort of police state. They lead happy fulfilled lives in general, and being told to not do those things isn't making a material difference to that. Respecting people's opinions or desires doesn't mean letting them do anything they want, and not letting…

You're a good father and what you wrote I agree, I don't know why some people downvoted you. Mutlitasking kills. What's wrong with a man telling his kids to not do multiple things at once and focus on the more important matters first?

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

#295

Post by bluishgreen » Fri, May 07, 2021, 3:03 AM UTC

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…

Disagree.

I am similar to you in where I am in my career, also similar profile in terms of how I got here, but I don't agree with you. I think this is a natural cycle and it shouldn't be sold as an insight or a learning.

Learning compounds, so if you spend an extra hour at 20 that is like a 1000 hours when you are 40. It is what it is. You have to balance at all times so as to not go over the edge, and loose touch with the feeling of meaning. So I don't regret burning myself from both ends at 20.

I have a kid now, and a family. Things are different, as much if not more fun. But I wouldn't want this life for my 20 year old version. He found meaning and growth in the trenches.

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

#296

Post by mastercoder82 » Fri, May 07, 2021, 8:44 AM UTC

twh270 wrote: post #275

arichard123 wrote: post #253

How do I know when I am multitasking? If I am cooking a meal, and that meal has several items on the go at once, am I multitasking? What if I have a complicated coding problem with multiple requirements which I have to consider, perhaps with political implications, so that I'm switching my thinking from a technical viewpoint, to a user experience viewpoint, to a "what will the leadership think" viewpoint? Is that mul…

For me, it's when I am consciously paying attention to more than one thing either "at the same time" (watching YouTube while cooking) or in rapid succession (run unit tests in the IDE, check email, look at story in JIRA, look at the weather on my phone, go back to the IDE to fix a failing test, ...). I was in this mode for years, racing around on overdrive, and I've been slowly learning to do One. Thing. At. A. Time.…

Paying attention to more than one thing "at the same time" - is not humanly possible. So when you are simultaneously doing two tasks that demand attention, what you are actually doing is rapid context switching. The thing to understand is that - “attention has inertia”. Context switching has two implications:

1. It drains your energy - You have limited energy available every day. If you spend most of your energy in context switching, very less is available for actual work. And if you over-work, you cause real physical damage to yourself.

2. You can’t do any deep work - Deep work requires attention on a single thing for a sustained period of time.

The idea is to work with your attention - not against it. The best way to do that is to reduce context switching and eliminate attention residue. Here is how:

1. Short-duration tasks - When you pick a task, finish it completely before moving on to the next one. Have distraction-free slots for work and batch similar tasks together.

2. Long-duration tasks - Pause-and-resume approach. When you pause a task, take a mental dump of its current state. This helps in two ways - first, your attention will not linger when you move to the next task and second, it will be easier to pick up when you resume that task.

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

#297

Post by ganzuul » Fri, May 07, 2021, 11:14 AM UTC

wlll wrote: post #291

ganzuul wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it isn't simple at all. You described yourself as extremely self-centered and you didn't seem to notice that you did so. I'm wondering if you are one of those people who seem to only ever use the left side of their brain. You can function in the role of a father in this mode but don't expect your kids to take care of you when you're old if you never respect their opinions and desires. I'm reaching out to you beca…

Calm down, I tell them not to watch Netflix or YouTube while they're concentrating on their homework because it will affect their ability to concentrate. It's not some sort of police state. They lead happy fulfilled lives in general, and being told to not do those things isn't making a material difference to that. Respecting people's opinions or desires doesn't mean letting them do anything they want, and not letting…

Cursing and telling others to calm down...

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

#298

Post by ganzuul » Fri, May 07, 2021, 11:16 AM UTC

posed wrote: post #293

ganzuul wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it isn't simple at all. You described yourself as extremely self-centered and you didn't seem to notice that you did so. I'm wondering if you are one of those people who seem to only ever use the left side of their brain. You can function in the role of a father in this mode but don't expect your kids to take care of you when you're old if you never respect their opinions and desires. I'm reaching out to you beca…

Wow, you judged the whole character of a person by a single incident in their life. Great.

You meanwhile enjoy drama so much you feel you need to participate in a discussion that doesn't conern you even if you possess nothing with which to contribute. How close was I?

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

#299

Post by Shorel » Fri, May 07, 2021, 2:04 PM UTC

refactor_master wrote: post #5

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. 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 don't think it is just bias, as if changing a setting somewhere would fix it. There's no easy fix, like the pill in Limitless, if that's what you are thinking.

It is more an energy management issue. The human brain consumes 20% of our energy intake if we are resting. And about 28% of our energy intake if it is performing some effort.

And all this work also generates waste, which needs to be moved to the blood and this takes time.

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

#300

Post by nefitty » Fri, May 07, 2021, 8:17 PM UTC

lanstin wrote: post #282

nefitty wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This “Type-A” hustle mentality resonates with me. I do see lots of people pushing back on it, ie ridiculing JD’s that mention passion, emphasizing work-life balance, disdain for “brogrammer” culture, etc. This seems especially prevalent on Twitter. My personal life doesn’t allow me to do marathons. If I was single I would probably be hauling ass all day every day. I understand the health implications, but the desire…

So to be clear, the myth of the 10x programmer is the person that learns Japanese when you start working with Japan as a market, sits around a lot talking about various types of teas, has an eidetic memory, has 3 months to write a major new service, and just thinks about it for like 2.5 months then comes in and types it in, in 30 hours. Not some well meaning person that makes up for a lack of skill by longer hours. T…

My understanding of 10x was basically a programmer who is 10x more productive than the average. I assumed the myth was dependent on the output, not necessarily the process...