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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)

#61

Post by weird-eye-issue »

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'm in my 20s and actually I do the same thing your son does pretty regularly. If it's a game I need to pay attention to then I wouldn't be watching a video though.

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

#62

Post by periheli0n »

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 recognize those symptoms. Happens to me too when stress levels have been constantly elevated for a while. Usually that's also when stupid errors start creeping into what I do. I think it might be an early sign of burnout.

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

#63

Post by OhSoHumble »

jvidalv wrote: post #54
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

Yeah, but the loss of sanity usually cancels out the productivity gains.

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

#64

Post by weird-eye-issue »

gautamdivgi wrote: post #4

I'd vote to have no notifications (of any kind) from chat & messaging tools as the default. This too especially at work to reduce overload of multi-tasking. Even showing the number of messages on an icon in the taskbar is very distracting.

The downside of no notifications is that you must manually check for changes

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

#67

Post by curiousllama »

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 really like #1. There's a good quote I've been focusing on recently - "people tend to overestimate what they can accomplish in a day, and underestimate what they can accomplish in a year."

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

#68

Post by Broken_Hippo »

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…

Realistically, this is having friends over while playing a game and tv/music on in the background. It really isn't all that out of the ordinary, and something we've done for quite some time. Heck, we did a version of this while getting very, very stoned and playing a PS1. None of it requires a lot of attention: You can rewatch/relisten to folks on youtube. Games don't need a lot of sounds, and if you die, you can restart. Friends will repeat if asked.

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

#69

Post by rajin444 »

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 imagine it's a mix of:

a) people are different. some people can grind more than others

b) passion makes the grind easy. people passionate about a project can go harder longer, but expecting everyone to be passionate about their job is not healthy. this passion may appear or disappear depending on your task

As to how to fix it I have no clue. That's hard.

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