Multitasking makes you dumb | Hacker News Reader

Multitasking makes you dumb

sirupsen.com

59 pointsjoeyespo28 comments

To say the least, the post is a worst possible example of "science":

1) Bad generalization: "Multitaskers actually become bad at multitasking, by multitasking". Reading the referenced article, we can find out that it talks not about generic multitasking but only "media consumption multitasking".

2) Incorrect conclusions: "Students who browse Facebook and instant messaging while doing homework on average achieve lower grades in school". Really? Don't you think that students who browse FB instead of doing homework are probably bound to do worse in class not because of multitasking but because they are just not interested in learning?

3) Just complete BS. "For instance, when driving and talking in cell phone, our brain assigns a higher priority to responding to our the phone conversation than focusing on the road." Really? The referenced article doesn't even have the word "brain" in it. I would be very curious to find out the source. And BTW, you should probably never fly in an airplane if you believe this BS since pilots constantly listen and talk on the radio while flying planes and navigating in the same time.

Yes, multitasking is not a "native" human skill. You have to learn how to do it and some are better in doing it than others. Also, it is absolutely correct that context switch has a price. However, you can learn how to do it effectively. As the result, while you productivity in each individual task will be impacted, the overall results will be better. And of course, one of the skills is to learn the priorities of different tasks to make sure that cell phone conversation is secondary to driving the car.

The empirical evidence presented by OP's blog post is far heavier than your objections to it. You have some valid points, but so does he. All other things equal, he has cited scientific studies and you haven't.

I am biased, because my reading has predisposed me to agree with OP that multitasking is the antithesis of productivity, but that's just my .02.

If you read my comment, then you might see that my objections are about citing "scientific studies" incorrectly.

Well, not really. Lets take objection #2 as an example. You wrote:

""" 2) Incorrect conclusions: "Students who browse Facebook and instant messaging while doing homework on average achieve lower grades in school". """

Which is a reasonable objection on the grounds that correlation does not imply causation. But keep that in mind: does not imply. The fact that something does not imply, does not mean it is necessarily false, or that the study was useless! In fact, the study gives us a lot more information than we had otherwise. So, it's better to draw an inference that's based on results, than none at all.

You go on to say:

""" Really? Don't you think that students who browse FB instead of doing homework are probably bound to do worse in class not because of multitasking but because they are just not interested in learning? """

Which is a hypothesis completely untested! Perhaps you should do a study.

"And BTW, you should probably never fly in an airplane if you believe this BS since pilots constantly listen and talk on the radio while flying planes and navigating in the same time."

To be fair, airplanes are not comparable to automobiles. Flying an airplane does not actually require nearly the amount of attention driving a car does. The sky is mostly empty, and planes will generally continue to fly straight ahead even if you let go of the control yoke. If you look away from the sky while flying, you're highly unlikely to swerve out of your air lane into another plane, rear-end a plane in front of you that braked suddenly, T-bone another plane at an intersection, or fly into a pedestrian using a crosswalk.

"...and planes will generally continue to fly straight ahead even if you let go of the control yoke."

Not really. P-factor, difference in the wings surface, etc. will create a force that will turn the plane.

As an IFR certified pilot I can tell you that during the approach (w/o autopilot) the pure "flying" workload is much higher than the workload of driving a car on a freeway (even in traffic).

> pilots constantly listen and talk on the radio while flying planes and navigating in the same time.

As a pilot, you should know than that talking and listening to the tower and navigating are part of piloting, and something you've trained to do.

Multitasking isn't just about doing more than one thing at a time. It's about doing multiple, un-related things at the same time.

During the approach, sure, there's a lot going on, but it's also highly regulated. You're dividing attention between the controls and the radio, but 1) you have another person to help you, and 2) the people you're talking to on the radio are there specifically to make sure you don't hit anyone. In IFR conditions, as you've obviously experienced yourself, paying attention to the radio is probably more important than looking out the window. In a car, on the other hand, the phone is pulling your attention away from the road, detracting from the navigation process rather than aiding it.

The key concept here is 'context switching' and how fast you can do it. Multitasking is considered bad because people switch contexts and lose bits of information in the process. Some people can retain their context longer, or have a workflow in which they can easily rebuild their context based on hints (notes, to-do lists, mental mind-map).

In my case, whenever I'm working on some complicated bit of code and someone interrupts me to ask a question, or to go to their desk, I have no problem doing it because I am already immersed in the task and don't need to offload it anywhere. If I realize that the talk is going to take longer than I though, or if it is about something completely different from what I'm working on, then I might scribble myself a quick note to get my mind back in the state that I need to be in.

Or another example: assisting two different people with two different programming problems via chat, while myself working on a third one, but all in the same codebase. There's not a lot of context switching required because we're all sharing the same code and are all in the same mindset. My productivity in terms of my own code does decrease using this method, but it's still more productive than taking the time to go and sit with each individual person to go through their problems one by one.

tl;dr: multitasking is impractical in some situations, but there are situations where you can benefit from it. I think it's a useful skill to be able to create those kind of situations for yourself (and your team).

I totally agree with this article. I've been playing a lot of video games in the past, always with the T.V. on, all while doing my homeworks and reading my school notes. I failed a few classes during that period of my life, and I finished pre-university a year later than expected. It turns out that it didn't pay off at all.

At the moment, I'm in University while working full-time, and my grades are where they should have been years ago. I'm getting As most of the time, and I believe it has a lot to do with how I handle my tasks. Since I'm only doing two classes at a time, I try to focus on one a week, on the other the next. I try to never work on two different subjects on the same day and I even force myself to avoid reading some article and trying new things because it would take my focus away from what I really have to do.

Dedicating our attention on one subject at a time always turns out better.

Anecdotes like yours don't prove anything. That's why we have science.

Without a control group and test group we don't know if your conclusions are statistically valid. Maybe most people get better grades when they watch TV and play video games.

I probably mis-worded my thoughts. I did not meant "it's true for x therefore it's true for the whole set". It's definetly not something we can generalize. At least, we can say that he's not completely wrong.

Nevertheless, I still believe that if such study was conducted, it would tend in that direction. The actual difference between a multi-tasker and a uni-tasker might not be very large, there might even not be any difference in some cases. Considering how the memory supposedly works, I find it hard to believe that one would retain the equivalent amount of information while multi-tasking than while uni-tasking.

This is a study from 2007 that goes in the same direction. It focuses on the impacts of social networking sites on high-schooler grades. [pdf]http://www.iiisci.org/journal/CV$/sci/pdfs/E214BL.pdf

Isn't it just common sense that doing two things at once means you'll have less time for both?

To make a fair comparison, you have to factor in your video game and TV performance and productivity, which is obviously suffering now.

Multitasking is for people who don't have to do work that requires deep concentration.

Concentration and multitasking are mutually exclusive. If you can't tell this from your own experience, then I implore you to actually check the literature out there.

I think part of the drawbacks of multi-tasking is attitude. The multi-taskers I've known have taken their approach as a sign of their intelligence, as if doing just one thing at a time is below their capabilities. They act as if they've tapped some special, hidden potential of the human brain that common people don't understand. Yet despite their super-human powers, they're often one or two tasks away from completing everything they're supposed to finish.

Their work is best described as achieving "limit as work approaches done." They continue to work on something, they get closer to completing it, but you could give them an infinite amount of time and they'd never finish.

I'll take devs who can focus on one task and complete it.

Ok, here goes my highly controversial sweeping generalization: men suck at multitasking, women are actually much better at it. My source? Just years of active observation. I'd be very interested to see any actual research on the subject.

Women ARE better at multitasking but when you compare their work when they've multi-tasked vs. when they uni-tasked, the most error free, accurate results come from the uni-tasking.

So it's not so black and white, men shouldn't multi-task but women can. More like, multi-tasking is bad for both genders but not as bad for women as for men.

Well, riding my motorcycle on the California freeways has shown me that women seem much more skilled than men at simultaneously driving, texting, adjusting the radio, and running over motorcyclists ("I just didn't see him there!")

"and running over motorcyclists ("I just didn't see him there!")"

I'd call you sexist, but my sample size of one smashed femur by a female left turner who didn't see me fails to disprove your theory.

From what I've read for studies on multitasking the basic problem is: Humans suck at multitasking. Female or male. We do better when we stick to one task at a time.

The impression that we can do more when multitasking is our own illusion.

Ironically playing action games improves your task switching ability, but you still do worse than if you unitasked.

In my experience multitasking skills aren't gender related. I've seen some people who could read and talk simultaneously very well, both men and women.

Aside from whether this article is right and accurate, can anyone share research-backed tips on how to get back from multitasking habit to singletasking? During career development ,for example from developer to manager, people take on more and more various duties and have to start multitasking. Is there a way to curb such performance deteriorating trend?

It's simple, ignore surrounding tasks and duties.

I'm afraid it's not that simple, unless you want to change your job ,'downgrade' to programmer and accept pay decrease. You could be lucky, but still changing back to lower rank often means less power over product's final shape, which you don't really want to give up. Anyone there with a more practical advice?

The problem test domain was inverted. Multitaskers see the water fall because they are not focused on singing Kum ba yah. The ones in the test set were told to ignore blue; they were really thinking why would they tell me to ignore blue. Blue has color, it has purpose, it must be relevant and when it is they would be the only ones to see the pattern thus making them true folk legends.

Generalization is what makes you dumb.

There's a relationship between these two themes of "multitasking iz 4 n00bz" and "dropping friends who are not makers/builders/hackers/achievers/doers" but who ruminate and cannot fix their problems.

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