Multitaskers

From the column Sacred Cows, Dominion Post, 2oo7.

I can see the irony in the fact that I answered the phone and replied to two emails while writing this opening paragraph. I also have the TV and the radio tuned to a kind of hybrid noise broadcast. This, I believe, will create the mental distortion needed to reflect on the true nature of multitasking. As a man, apparently, I cannot multitask. As a result, this paragraph, which would have been brilliant, remains unwritten and in its place only this flimsy filler remains. And that’s multitasking.

Today we salute the multitasker, the nine armed, stressoholic freak who hurtles past your desk in a withering vortex of wasted energy. She lives within a distortion bubble of chaos and delusion, far beyond the coverage-area of reality, and she glides through life without a clue that her organizational technique—her ability to perform several tasks at once—is a complete myth. Not content with doing one job well the multitasker aims to do all jobs partially. Not content with taking credit for work she actually performs the multitasker aims to take credit for every project for which she attended one development meeting while talking on her cellphone and collating a to-do spreadsheet on her PDA.

Multitasking is a term cribbed from computers and describes the act of performing more than one task simultaneously. The term has evolved to become a management tool for those who like to max-the-extreme, facilitate-the-envelope and alienate their colleagues and families. Our society has produced many tools and services to assist the multitasker – cellphones, blackberries, hands-free headsets, fast-food, speed-dating. The phenomenon has also thrown up a number of multitasker subgroups: Hysterical multitaskers – those who make organizing an office Christmas party look like Operation Desert Storm. Procrastinatory multitaskers – those who use multitasking as a smokescreen for surfing the net. Homicidal multitaskers – those who touch up their makeup while changing lanes on a motorway. I love them all. Love them and fear them.

As many experts point out, the brain simply isn’t wired to multitask. The way the brain is configured means we can do two things at once as long as one of them is something we've practiced so much that it doesn't require any sort of cognitive planning. This is why a talented pianist can talk to you while performing a sonata or why your teenage child can compose a text message while responding to your questions with a series of grunts. “Multitasking doesn’t look to be one of the great strengths of human cognition,” says James C. Johnston, a research psychologist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, in an article in Time. “It’s almost inevitable that each individual task will be slower and of lower quality.”

Joshua Rubinstein, Ph.D., of the Federal Aviation Administration, David Meyer, Ph.D., and Jeffrey Evans, Ph.D., both at the University of Michigan, recently explored this issue in more depth. They studied patterns in the amounts of time lost when people switched repeatedly between two tasks of varying complexity and familiarity. The measurements revealed that for all types of tasks, subjects lost time when they had to switch from one task to another, and time costs increased with the complexity of the tasks, so it took significantly longer to switch between more complex tasks. Time costs also were greater when subjects switched to tasks that were relatively unfamiliar. Thus, multitasking may seem more efficient on the surface, but may actually take more time in the end.

Men are not multitaskers but despite fashionable thought this has nothing to do with genetics. Men have had many generations of workplace experience to learn a simple truth: that the more jobs you take responsibility for, the more failures you’re likely to be blamed for. Women, on the other hand, have been forced to spend most of history managing a home and a brood of children and their day has mostly involved carrying out a series of habitual, overlapping micro-tasks. They have tried to project this model onto the modern workplace, it hasn’t worked and we, until now, have been too scared to tell them.

Telling a multitasker that they’re not doing anything real or useful is like telling a child that Santa doesn’t exist, or Tom Cruise that Scientology is a crock. The term has cultivated absolute belief amongst leading practitioners and their legion of shrill multitaskateers. The multitasker in flight resembles a bad magician, performing a flurry of transparent tricks before a bemused audience and then claiming that there’s some kind of magic behind it. There is no magic behind it, though it is, in every sense, an illusion. Whenever I see one in action, juggling her way toward an early stroke, I think of what my dad always says about such people: “If you shoved a broom in their backsides they’d sweep the floor as well.” He may be right, but I prefer to think of the beautiful line from Emily Dickinson: “Because I could not schedule a breakfast meeting with death, he kindly scheduled one for me.”