This guest post comes courtesy of Craig Silverman, who wrote about productivity for the September issue of Unlimited.

Science wants you to stop multitasking. Maybe that statement is a bit strong. But here’s the thing: research into distraction and productivity tends to waver between telling you that multitasking is good, and advising the exact opposite.

The latest findings suggest that multitasking is bad for you. Hell, even the Harvard Business Review and Wall Street Journal recently advised workers to slow their roll and focus on one thing at a time. With that in mind, let’s look at the recent arguments in favour of the beautiful, slow work life.

The Evils of Multitasking
The latest blow to the multitasking work ethos comes courtesy of research conducted at Stanford University and published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. When contacted by Reuters for comment, here’s how one of the researchers, Eyal Ophir, explained the team’s findings:

We knew that multitasking was difficult from a cognitive perspective. We thought, ‘What’s this special ability that people have that allows them to multitask?’ … Rather than finding things that they were doing better, we found things they were doing worse.

The suggestion is that multitaskers constantly fall victim to distraction and aren’t good at blocking out stimuli in order to focus on the task at hand. They flail from one thing to the next. You need to get into a zone where you can pop in and out of the email you’re writing to answer an instant message while scanning your Twitter feed.

One issue the researchers identified is that multitaskers were susceptible to distraction by “irrelevant” things. From the study’s abstract:

Results showed that heavy media multitaskers are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory. This led to the surprising result that heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability, likely due to reduced ability to filter out interference from the irrelevant task set. These results demonstrate that media multitasking, a rapidly growing societal trend, is associated with a distinct approach to fundamental information processing.

Being successful in today’s workplace requires an ability to manage distraction. This research suggests multitaskers aren’t as good at this as previously thought. But multitasking itself is a form of managed distraction, so perhaps the point is to not let yourself get too, yes, distracted by these findings.

Speed Does Not Equal Progress
Not long before the latest multitasking research snapped people’s attention away from multiple screens and windows, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) carried an interesting argument in favour of slowing down. The website of the Harvard Business Review also published a piece that advocated a day of rest for all.

The Journal’s piece was adapted from the upcoming book the Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox, by Granta editor John Freeman. It’s more of a philosophical and emotional take on our too much, too fast world, but the message is clear: slow down or you’ll miss out on what really matters.

Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change,” he writes. “In short, we need to slow down.

The WSJ article is an elegant paean to mindful working and living, and it’s hard to argue with the basic premise. He also makes the point that speed kills:

Employees communicating at breakneck speed make mistakes. They forget, cross boundaries that exist for a reason, make sloppy errors, offend clients, spread rumors and gossip that would never travel through offline channels, work well past the point where their contributions are helpful, burn out and break down and then have trouble shutting down and recuperating.

Freeman touches on the fact that multitasking and the always-on world of connectivity has smashed the barrier between work and personal time. This in turn has “put us under great physical and mental strain, altering our brain chemistry and daily needs. It has isolated us from the people with whom we live, siphoning us away from real-world places where we gather.”

I know, fun stuff. In the end, Freeman circles back to an argument that fits with the findings of the above study: “We can store a limited amount of information in our brains and have it at our disposal at any one time.”

Figure out how many tasks you can handle at once and your brain — and hopefully your boss — will thank you.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 6:12 am and is filed under Current Events/Social Studies, Daily Blog, Think Tank. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.