Computers are not really able to multitask either, except for true parrallel processing machines. They usually just assign small amounts of time to different task, just like you mention people that claim to be multitaskers do.

However the one things computers do that we could learn from is interrupt driven switching of tasks. ALthough I’m pretty sure I saw interrupt driven work mentioned here at some stage.

As an example, I often find myself waiting for things to finish compiling, or simulations to run, or even web pages to load when the net is overloaded at my University. So I may not really doing multiple things personally, but I’m waiting for tasks to complete on my computer and dealing with them as they come around. The computer is doing multitasking for me :)

Semantics semantics.

Washing dishes while dinner cooks is “performing” multiple “tasks” “during the same period of time”.

[…] The myth of multitasking. (mp3) […]

Meh. I think that’s more than semantics if you catch what I was trying to say.

Maybe I have “Alan Watts on the Brain,” but you’re not actually transitively cooking if you’re doing the dishes. Lots of things we’ve caused to happen in the world are going on at one time; that doesn’t mean we’re “doing them” all the time they’re happening someplace.

I don’t doubt for a second that people can get more done with more efficiency by starting one plate spinning then running to the next (I do stuff like that too). I just need to get a message to overwrought people that the inability to really do five things at once is not a form of retardation—it’s simply being human. And away melts the irrational guilt that you aren’t actually “Hal.”

Fair enough.

There’s a lovely example of the evils of multitasking in Goldratt’s Critical Chain.

Suppose you have three things to deliver: A, B and C. Suppose they all take, I don’t know, 2 days each to complete. If you did them one after the other, A will be finished by day 3, B by day 5, and C by day 7. AABBCC.

Now suppose you want to satisfy the people who commissioned B and C that you’re paying attention to them, and you decide to multitask. So you decide to split things up, and work on them in one day blocks, ABCABC.

The result is that now A is delivered on day 5, two days later than before, and B is delivered on day 6, one day late, and C is delivered on day 7, no earlier than it was before. You’ve potentially pissed off two people for no benefit.

If you work through the example with shorter and shorter timeslices you can see that the more finegrained your multitasking, the later all the tasks become.

Of course it’s worse in the real world because of the overhead of context switching, something computer scientists know all about.

So true. Many women claim to be multi-taskers, don’t believe them. It’s only wishful thinking, a huge big myth. I liked the explanation of the Goldratt’s Critical Chain. I’ll send it to my team so they understand that, if they keep asking me for a new thing every 5 min., they’ll only get it done my Christmas.

Hy from Barcelona, Merlin! I would like to congratulate you for your site and ask if it’s possible to get the transcription of your podcasts. For those of us who don’t have a very good level in english is better to read than hear you. Thanks a lot!

Agreed.

[takes sip of coffee, looks over at window, notes intricate pattern on back of hand resembles map of Venice canals]

Yup. Definitely true.

I’m with flaneuse on the transcripts, listening to a podcast is way more time consuming and productivity-sapping than reading the equivalent post.

I once met a researcher who got subjects to do tricky mental calculations with very sensitive motion detectors strapped to their heads. It turns out that even staying balanced standing up requires miniscule bits of our attention and thus we start to sway if concentrating too hard on something else. He asked me to add a few numbers up while standing on one leg; it’s surprisingly hard. This is also the reason that people close their eyes or look to one side when trying to remember something.

…listening to a podcast is way more time consuming and productivity-sapping than reading the equivalent post…

Uh, yeah. Transcripts? You’re all kidding, right? For a 3-minute podcast you require a written transcript?

It’s not a Papal Edict, people; it’s 180 seconds of caffeinated ranting.

With respect: if you don’t have 3 spare minutes to enjoy free audio content, then I’d humbly posit that podcasts may not actually be your bag.

Maybe someday, Sufficiently Advanced Technology™ can generate transcripts automagically, but that would be way too much manual overhead for such an informal product. Sorry, gang.

My feeling was that the whole idea of the podcasting was to save time for Merlin on writing something. Now, be honest Merlin :) What I like about the idea of the podcasting is that it is clutter-free. You listen to it, reflect on it and then go on with your life. What is time-consuming is reading and posting comments. ;)

I just multitasked by listening to this mp3 while working on my evil ppt thingy. What was it about again?

About Goldratt’s Critical Chain: When I was in college, I noticed this phenomena too. There is one twist though: creative thought (What’s the best way to solve this problem? What should I write my term paper about?) is more compatible with an interleaved ABCABC pattern of work than a straight AABBCC pattern.

What I mean is, that if you need to think creatively to solve a hard problem, you are more likely to hit a solution if you think about it for a while (work on A) and then go on and work on something else (work on B), leaving room for a flash of insight.

However, B usually is equal to “take a shower”*, or “walk the dog”. If you try to make your B task equal to “solve this other hard problem”, you just get gridlock, and block out any chance of having an “aha!” Note that interpersonal interactions are a known hard problem of human life! *See Dilbert, et. al. Nice preview, btw. How on earth did you do that?

Oh, come off it—for the time being the web consists of text. Searchable text is how we find things in the first place, how we find them again later, how we quote things to each other, and how we reread the parts we’re most interested in. Transcripts make lots of sense.

I understand that you’re a busy man, but can’t you find a volunteer among your large readership who’d be stoked to transcribe your podcasts? Anyone? Bueller?

Oh, come off it—for the time being the web consists of text. Searchable text is how we find things in the first place, how we find them again later, how we quote things to each other, and how we reread the parts we’re most interested in. Transcripts make lots of sense.

Maybe so for you. To me? Not so much.

I didn’t start doing this in order to produce more text; that’s precisely the point. It’s a largely-improvised audio artifact, and hand-crafting some toneless written transcript of it would be akin to doing needlepoint about a baseball game; it might be interesting to a couple people but it completely misses the point of the project (and the appeal of the medium, AFAIC).

Would a transcript be useful as a metadata means for finding information? You bet. Am I personally going to spend 4x the amount of time the actual recording took to produce that? Breath should not be held.

And with regard to “what the web consists of?” Wow. I can’t believe all these MP3s I’ve gotten over the last 6 years are made up exclusively of text. They seem like kind of dull reading—but they sound terrific. ;-)

When you’re done with that podcast transcription, could you please also print me out a hard copy, bind it, and mail it to me? I only process things while “multitasking” on the john. If not, I really don’t think you’re giving me my money’s worth for this site.

What? It’s free? Never mind.

The computer equivalent of doing the dishes while cooking is delegating tasks to “intelligent co-processors”. When your computer wants to read some data from the disk it tells a disk controller “go get disk sector 2346”. It then goes off and does something else for a while. Eventually the disk controller comes back and says “Here it is”, and your computer pays attention to that.

So it isn’t really muti-tasking in the computer sense, but delegation to specialized devices/services so that the general purpose CPU can do other things. Which is probably an important lesson on how to get things done.

For example I COULD put up the dri-wall for our bathroom remodelling project, but it is more efficient for me to hire someone else to do it, while I do something else.

Merlin: It’s not a Papal Edict, people; it’s 180 seconds of caffeinated ranting.

Damn, Merlin, that is such a good description for my blog..

:-D

Can I quote you?

Merlin, I won’t ask you for a transcript but I want to quote you for the piece I am writing called “Against Multitasking.” The thrust of it: Like you, I am convinced multitasking is a myth. Not just a myth but the most pernicious, unachievable, anti-woman idea to come down the pike since panty girdles. What is this? Not only can you have it all, you can have it all at once? They have got to be kidding. The (mostly women’s) magazines that promote it are playing a cruel trick on their already overstressed and for-the-most-part guilt-ridden readers. I have to confess I’m a Zen-influenced extremist who’s found some peace and sanity by trying to give each thing I do my complete attention, one thing at a time. This way of living can be beautiful, say, when you’re nursing a baby and for once choose not to watch TV. It lets you notice things that will echo in your memory forever. When I see someone reading on a treadmill or something I want to scream “Don’t do that to yourself!”

You are constantly multi-tasking.

People manage to drive, navigate (i.e. watch for landmarks), and carry on conversations with passengers at the same time.

Men are particularly good at this. They can track a conversation (usually with a wife/SO) while watching TV/playing a computer game/reading a book, and manage to track the conversation—at least to the degree that they can make the appropriate single-syllable noises at the right times.

It is true that most people who claim to have this ability don’t do it as well (or as pervasively) as they claim, and they are, in fact, time-slicing (even thinly), however there are people in other professions who do.

Watch a SWAT team (a good one) work a problem. Watch a good military officer carry out a mission. A trauma surgeon in an ER during a Mass Casualty event. These people are multitasking while working on extremely complex situations were a single mistake, missing a single word in a conversation (say dropping a “not”) could get someone killed.

Watch an Air Traffic Controller at a busy airport, or the pilot he’s talking to.

Yeah, people can multi-task, but not all of them, and not always well.

There probably is an upper bound on the number of tasks that one can work at a time, and (As another commenter alluded to) you’ve only got so much attention to go around, so as you dump more and more attention onto one task the others get “resource starved”, but with work (like any other muscle) you can build up this ability to a certain degree.

Petro, yes, it’s possible, but that doesn’t mean that the results are as desireable as if you can devote your attention to the task. I believe and assert that as a universal constant; call it the physics of humanity if you like. To use one of your examples, I’ve not been on a SWAT team (nowhere near that elite) but I do have training (or did have, eons ago) as a rifleman, and also as an infantry communicator. A section attack is a lot easier when you’re a rifleman than when you’re trying to command the attack, or even if you’re just the poor sap who has to schlep the radio. ATCs multitask, sure, but it’s not scaleable, and ditto the trauma surgeon.

As for tracking conversations with SOs while playing on the computer or watching TV: I long ago gave up trying to talk to my wife when she’s in one of those environments, and I refuse to talk to people at work when they’re looking at their PC. Conversely, I turn away from my PC to talk to people. It’s just too distracting otherwise.

re transcripts: personally I’d read them, and probably find them useful. I’ve yet to listen to a podcast, although I’ve downloaded several. While I understand why you don’t want to go to the extra work of making one yourself, Merlin, I don’t understand why the very idea apparently offended you, either. I don’t think anybody’s said they require a transcription, although it was pointed out that not everybody’s native language was English - reading comprehension is almost always better than oral. But hey, your site, your rules.

Great podcast! I just read a story elsewhere about a disheartening study on the time it takes to get re-oriented on a task after an interruption during the weekday. Self-inflicted interruptions by multi-taskers are no better, I’m sure.

In terms of actually attempting to do more than one thing, I’m definitely in the “single-tasking” camp, but I wonder what you (Merlin) and the other commenters think of dividing one’s attention during rote activities—obvious ones like listening to talk or music while driving or exercising, or listening to, watching, or reading something while doing mundane, repetitive chores (i.e., having the TV on while doing dishes, or reading e-mail while pulling staples and restacking a mass of paperwork for scanning—something I did quite a bit of back in my desk-jockey days). It seems to me sometimes it’s okay to slow productivity down a little, if it allows even the less-deep consumption of content one wouldn’t have had time to read/watch/listen to otherwise.

The one that irks me, and that it should by now be obvious can’t actually be done, is the people who attempt to have two conversations at once. Anybody who’s ever been on the phone with someone who was checking their e-mail knows darn well you certainly—and obviously—can’t hold two conversations at once within an order of magnitude of the skill you can hold one.

I’m wondering if anyone has any theories on listening to music while working. Is it considered another task? Are there specific tasks where music is not beneficial? Is there specific types of music better-suited for working?

I would say that listening to music wouldn’t be another ‘task’ per se, since it SHOULDN’T require your ‘active’ attention. However, it possibly could distract you (depending on your attention span) from getting things done any faster.

Let’s look at this via a metaphorical cliche.

At a former job I was dealing with several different assignments at a time. When new ones came in, I asked for priorities so that the most important tasks got done first; to which my boss (female, by the way; I have no idea whether this is relevant, but see Laura M. and Clementina’s comments) replied that they all were important, they all were needed right away, and I should learn to “juggle” them.

Which sounded good and business-y, of course — until you examined that figure. Catching a ball and returning it to the air takes the same amount of time no matter how many balls are involved. What changes with additional balls, therefore, is the time between when each ball leaves your hand and when it returns. The more you have, the less attention each one gets in a given period, and the longer the overall process takes.

Leaving aside the obvious joke about what it takes to do this kind of juggling, I’ll say only that this metaphor is most commonly used by people who haven’t followed it through to its implications.

i disagree, but not in the context that you mean it.

let’s take the example of taking a test. we’ll follow two scenarios: you are taking the test, and you run into a problem you know a little about but can’t get the answer right away. first scenario, you sit there and try to think the answer through, then move on. the second, you move on, then during the middle of a different problem, you realize the answer to the first problem. from personal observation, the second scenario yields better results. the reason would be that even while you’re thinking about the new problems, you are still thinking about the first (maybe it’s just the ocd in me), you then get the answer to the first ‘hard’ question for free, in that you’ve spent your time thinking about other things instead of trying to think about the first thing.

not really what you were talking about, but something i still feel to be true. yes, belief, but please someone with the resources find out; i’ve spelled out a good test for it.

just my ramblings, take it for what you will.

If women claim to be good at multi-tasking, they (we) may just be making a virtue of painful necessity. If you spend full time, or almost full time, for a few years caring for a child or children, you find that you are constantly interrupted when you are trying to concentrate on something, like writing your doctoral dissertation. It is frustrating to be interrupted in the midst of a task that takes full and extended concentration. The trouble is that both the child and the dissertation require full and extended, preferably uninterrupted concentration. But after a while you get used to it, which is bad, because when your child becomes independent you find yourself seeking interruptions, needing them even, at the very peak of your concentration. So everything (like writing a book) takes a whole lot longer than it would have than similar tasks you performed when you were pre-child. In short, I agree that the whole non-idea of multi-tasking is at best wrong-headed, and any employer who encourages and expects multi-tasking from employees should be shot dead.

Multi-tasking - we all do it. I read mail, e-mail, books, etc while drinking tea. I knit and watch television. I have, in the past, soothed a savage baby while stirring gravy, soup or some such thing. However, we do take this too far. And Merlin is right when he says, in most cases, we are really interupting one task to do another and then returning to the first task. I work in a library and I know that I am not cataloging books and serving patrons at the same time - it just feels that way. Oh, and the savage babies, three of them, all grew up just fine.

[…] Steven Johnson on battling the email and interruption avalanches with smarter technology. He also cites the King’s College study suggesting that “multitasking” makes you less productive than if you’d been doing bong hits. […]