Multitasking may be an illusion that actually hurts productivity and increases error, according to various scientific studies. An article in yesterday’s New York Times, looked at the “limits” of multitasking. For example, a recent Vanderbilt University experiment with brain scans showed that particpants experienced up to a one second delay in reaction time when trying to do two things at once. Of course, that could be a problem if, say, you’re checking email while driving at 65 mph. A separate scientific paper suggests that “beyond an optimum, more multitasking is associated with declining project completion rates and revenue generation.” The article also touches on how new social filtering systems and other technologies are emerging that may help us deal with cognitive overload, a notion that my colleagues and I at Institute for the Future are currently exploring. Unfortunately though, there’s no mention of Linda Stone’s work on Continuous Partial Attention, a concept I think best describes how I tend to work. From the New York Times article:
“Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes,” said David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan. “Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.”
The human brain, with its hundred billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections, is a cognitive powerhouse in many ways. “But a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once,” said René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University…
In a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites.
“I was surprised by how easily people were distracted and how long it took them to get back to the task,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft research scientist and co-author, with Shamsi Iqbal of the University of Illinois, of a paper on the study that will be presented next month.
Link (Thanks, Marina Gorbis!)