Illusions: What COVID-19 taught me about multi-tasking

I’m a project manager by trade. I don’t have a degree in project management. I got the job the old-fashioned way, by accident. I learned a lot on my own, and from other people I met along the way. Some lessons were much harder to learn than others. After more than 20 years I’ve developed a pretty good sense for what it takes to make complex software projects successful.

One of those skills, I am tempted to call multi-tasking, is one that I feel is critical to doing this job well. I generally don’t have to write things down, as things move so fast and change so quickly information has a very short shelf life in my experience. I manage programs with 3-4 separate projects and am able to juggle all of that effectively in my head. I once thought this was an example of multi-tasking. With the changes in business COVID-19 has put us through, I’ve been pondering this lately.

Blinded by science

You’ve probably seen the same stuff on TV or internet that I have where they “scientifically prove” humans can’t multi-task by putting somebody behind the wheel of a car, make them drive thru some obstacle course, all the while being on the phone responding to someone asking them to do complex math in their head. Guess what, the driver mows a bunch of cones over. Solid evidence, narrow scope.

Then I think about F-14 fighter pilots. In a dog fight with an opposing aircraft, these people are maneuvering in 3-dimensional space at high speed. In the cockpit they have navigational aids, aircraft systems indicators, warning klaxons, weapons targeting systems, radios, a smorgasbord of auditory and visual inputs. They have to make multiple life or death decisions in a split second based on all that audio-visual sensory overload. They have to coordinate the movements of both hands and feet and have split second reflexes. To accommodate the fighter pilot’s sensory overload, their brains automatically prioritize and filter these events, prioritizing the ones that are imminent threats first and filtering out all the low priority noise.

Have they achieved true multi-tasking abilities?

I tend to agree with the science that says humans cannot truly do two things at the same time, any more than we can be in two places at the same time. Yet, considering the fighter pilot, I’d have to say that scenario comes about as close as any human being can come, and at least creates the illusion of multi-tasking, certainly from an observer’s point of view.

If you believe that true multi-tasking is impossible, the logical alternative is time slicing. Doing things serially, but at a greatly accelerated rate, evaluating two or more equally likely outcomes and deciding on one without even consciously thinking about it is part of that skill and art.

We’re going to need a bigger boat

Offloading tasks to subconscious cerebral processors is something that the brain has been doing since the first cave man stabbed a dinosaur with a stick, and first uttered the words, “I’m going to need a bigger stick”. The brain simply can’t consciously process all the inputs all the time. It has to offload work to the black box part of the brain. How does it know which ones to do that with and when? Under stress, it has to do this even faster with the stakes potentially being life or death. Does the brain just know these things or does it learn them? Is this what intuition is all about?

I don’t think it is baked into our DNA, otherwise no one would ever say things like “Bob can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.” In the last 20 years, this Bob, has learned to make quick decisions. Thankfully not life or death ones. I take audio visual inputs, process, and decide in the blink of an eye. If you asked me how, I can only guess that it is some kind of mental muscle memory. That kind of muscle memory that makes the instantaneous decision to offload parts of the process to the highly optimized subconscious where that muscle memory lives.

This is the part of the brain that works like a mental chain reaction that is like a room full of mouse traps when one trips and hits another and another and so on – except the brain somehow figures out how to be able to anticipate which one will trip next – through the process of training the brain over time.

So, I can make decisions with very high degree of certainty, very quickly because I’d had enough experiences to train the subconscious processor part of the brain that creates the illusion of multi-tasking by mimicking it due to the sub-second speed at which it operates.

What’s happening to me?

On a normal day, in a normal project, I’d guess 10-20% of my brain work is done subconsciously, so I effectively get that much more work done every day. Now that normal doesn’t apply anymore, I am finding my brain struggling to get anything done much less with the efficiency it was performing at last year.

In a typical software project or program made up of many projects, there is a common goal. In general, there is a common set of people. Most things I deal with generally are with that same group of people and align with the same goal, so my brain can easily find patterns, categorize and prioritize the work, and the prioritize and filter the audio-visual inputs; no conscious thinking required.

Enter COVID-19, the global game changer.

Because of COVID-19, our company as well as our customers, are shifting to a remote working model, and in some cases, rescheduling work. In addition to project work, I have many other very interesting, but very unrelated internal projects with different groups of people, on my plate.

Now my day is made up of many completely different tasks and people. Randomly placed blocks of time in my schedule with no pattern or predictability of the subject matter or the duration. My brain is struggling to find the patterns it craves, to learn to optimize, but so far the inputs are too random. The result is my brain is thrashing from subject to subject. I am finding I have to start writing things down instead of being able to commit them to memory.

Stop, Dave, Stop…

Anybody recall the epic 1968 Stanley Kubrick film “2001: A Space Odyssey”? In a particularly memorable scene, Dave, one of the astronauts, is pulling processor cores out of the HAL-9000 computer on board that has gone rogue. As Dave pulls the cores out, HAL is pleading with him, “Stop Dave Stop…” As each of the multiple cores is pulled out HAL continues to plead but his voice is getting slower and slower. That’s kinda how my brain felt for a week or two.

Things that might usually take me an hour now might take 2-3 hours to complete. I used to be able to work in a busy, noisy, environment full of constant interruptions, and tune it all out to get the task done. Now I need some quiet, dedicated time to do that same task.

The brain is truly an amazing thing. Despite all this, I can tell my brain is already adapting, my focus is sharpening, and my efficiency is improving.

Conclusion

Thanks to COVID-19 disrupting my normal pattern of work, I was able to be part of my own private experiment. This has proven, that for me, multi-tasking is in fact a learned/trained phenomenon of being able to process work serially, but at a very efficient rate due to the brain’s ability to develop mental muscle memory, optimize by finding patterns, prioritize threats, and filter noise. Those things gave me the ability to have laser focus, make decisions quickly and accurately, and be more efficient.

I’ve also been able to watch my brain re-train itself, once again make order out of chaos, and optimize processing with new parameters. All without me consciously directing it to do. This is truly amazing to observe, and I am thankful that we humans have this marvelous ability to adapt to new situations so quickly.

So, what was it I was taking about again?