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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)

#51

Post by periheli0n »

athenot wrote: post #41
Taek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

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.

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

#52

Post by AnimalMuppet »

nicoburns wrote: post #10
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 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.

"Never work overtime longer than one week in a row" - one of Extreme Programming's tenets.

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

#53

Post by agumonkey »

personal anecdote but after trying too hard and feeling actual physical "pain" I came to the conclusion that learning needs a threshold of closure (which feels good), a coarse level conclusion about what was just processed. Piling up unconclusive signals on top of each other results in wounds it seems.

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

#54

Post by jvidalv »

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…

Get a frontend job, instant compile time haha

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

#55

Post by tzs »

slver wrote: post #50

Previous studies: - "Women 'better at multitasking' than men, study finds" https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-24645100 This study: - "Multitasking Lowers IQ" - "Successful People Don't Multitask" - "While more research is needed to determine if multitasking is physically damaging the brain (versus existing brain damage that predisposes people to multitask), it's clear that multitasking has negative effects.…

> "Women 'better at multitasking' than men, study finds"

They tested this on Mythbusters and got the same result [1].

[1] https://mythresults.com/battle-of-the-sexes-round-2

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

#56

Post by AnimalMuppet »

wvenable wrote: post #23
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…

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.

And I did college physics homework with the tape deck running. (I'd turn it off when I really needed to focus, though...)

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

#57

Post by bluefirebrand »

tshaddox wrote: post #45
bluefirebrand wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty wide amount of tasks, and more than that it's a lot of sensory input. It makes me wonder if they are actually processing any of it or just letting it sort of wash over them. Like at the end of it could they give you a detailed report about what happened with any one of those things? Even just asking for the gist of things, I imagine at least one of those things is being tuned out entirely. For instanc…

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 thrown at you that you are mostly ignoring is the same thing as multi-tasking.

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

#58

Post by 0xFACEFEED »

nicoburns wrote: post #10
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 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 hours. 99.999% of the time you're doing it to calm people's nerves or make someone (yourself? PM? EM?) look good.

2) My reasons for doing these marathon sessions was a lie.

I told myself that I'm doing it because I love the product, love the work, love this, love that. I'm an artisan, I told myself. A professional. Work is my life. Isn't it the same for those Japanese knife maker guys? I'm like those guys. I live this work.

The real reason was fear. Fear of not being the best, fear of not being successful, etc. I felt like I didn't have a place among MIT/Stanford grads. So I compensated with brute force.

--

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.

Wrote a nasty bug? No problem, ship a fix at 11:30pm and the impact is minimal. People are much less likely to criticize you if you're the person sitting up at 11:30pm shipping to production. Clearly your heart is in the right place, right?

The "trick", I found, was to work for people who NEVER EVER demanded more than 7 hours a day from me BUT also appreciated that I'd go well above and beyond expectations. Now that I think about it, it reminds of drug dealing (or the little I know about it from when I was a teen).

I feel fortunate that I was able to disassociate my fear of failure from my genuine love for the work. These days I'm able to be very productive and lead a relatively healthy life but it took waaaay too long for me to figure out how.

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

#59

Post by periheli0n »

From a computer science perspective, context switching is hugely expensive in humans, and that's why they are not good at multitasking.

Strictly speaking, even computers don't execute multiple tasks in parallel, at least not on the same core. Even with hyperthreading, each step in the pipeline can only work on one datum at a time. Computation is always serialised, and any context switching comes at a cost. It's just that in computers this cost doesn't matter so much, and/or it's outweighed by the benefits of weaving tasks into each other.

Nevertheless, Multitasking is a myth, technically.

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

#60

Post by gobins »

josefresco wrote: post #44

My 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.
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