Winners Don't Multitask

Researchers realized that heavy multitaskers are paying a high price.

I tell my youngest child, "Go on, but I have to take this call" as I answer "Hi this is Steve..." phone in one hand, pen in the other, reading some email that just popped up from a prospect!...all at the same time.

Admit it. We all do it. We think we are getting so much done; we are probably getting very little accomplished.

A few hours later..."WHERE WERE YOU? I said what? When? Why would I let you bike entirely across town to see that movie with who? Do I even know this Trevor person?”

In a nutshell, research shows that “Doing two things at once is difficult. When two tasks have to be performed within a short interval, the second is sharply delayed, an effect called the University of Utah psychology Professor David Strayer, adds, “The people who are most likely to multitask harbor the illusion they are better than average at it, when in fact they are no better than average and often worse.”

Stanford researchers found that people who are regularly inundated with several streams of electronic information (email, phone calls, text messages, news alerts, normal environmental distracts – children, co-workers, even the radio) do not pay attention, control their memory, or switch from one task to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time. (2)

But after putting students through a series of three tests, the researchers realized those heavy media multitaskers are paying a high price.

"They're suckers for irrelevancy," said communication Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers whose findings are published in the Aug. 24th 2009 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Everything distracts them."

Social scientists have long assumed that it's impossible to process more than one string of information at a time. The brain can't do it. But many researchers have guessed that people who appear to multitask must have superb control over what they think about and what they pay attention to. But they don’t.

"We kept looking for what they're better at, and we didn't find it," said Ophir, the study's lead author and a researcher in Stanford's Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab.

In each of their tests, the researchers split their subjects into two groups: those who regularly do a lot of media multitasking and those who don't.

In one experiment, the groups were shown sets of two red rectangles alone or surrounded by two, four or six blue rectangles. Each configuration was flashed twice, and the participants had to determine whether the two red rectangles in the second frame were in a different position than in the first frame.

They were told to ignore the blue rectangles, and the low multitaskers had no problem doing that. But the high multitaskers were constantly distracted by the irrelevant blue images. Their performance was horrible.

"The low multitaskers did great," Ophir said. "The high multitaskers were doing worse and worse the further they went along because they kept seeing more letters and had difficulty keeping them sorted in their brains."

When they're in situations where there are multiple sources of information coming from the external world or emerging out of memory, they're not able to filter out what's not relevant to their current goal," said Wagner, an associate professor of psychology. "That failure to filter means they're slowed down by that irrelevant information." 

The University of Utah study indicates that people who multitask the most – including talking on a cell phone while driving – are least capable of doing so.

So maybe it's time to stop texting, thinking about your next deal, if you're following the big game on TV, and rethink humming along with

the radio if you're reading the latest training online. By doing less, you might accomplish a whole lot more.

(1) https://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/august24/multitask-research-study-082409.html

(2) https://archive.unews.utah.edu/news_releases/frequent-mulitaskers-are-bad-at-it/