I just read a fabulous article by Walter Kirn called "The Autumn of the Multitaskers" in November 2007's The Atlantic. It’s the 150th anniversary edition, by they way, and full of great stuff.But first: Remember when you learned irony in high school English but never really knew what it was? Here is an example, and I will swear to the following facts:
While reading Kirn’s article, I put cookies in the oven (I know, I know, but I’m working at home today and you only get kids coming home from school for so many years), responded to twelve emails, subscribed to The Atlantic, had a thought for my next book and stuck it on my brainstorming sheet (in Mindjet, of course), took a call from my daughter to negotiate a last-minute late-bus request, took a call from our COO asking me to look at a slide deck online, got a Diet Coke, went to the bathroom cause I drank the Diet Coke, read a poem called Doo-Wop on a page adjacent to the article, signed for the Gevalia coffee from UPS, and stirred the stuff in the crockpot (I know, I know—being domestic today). All while music from Pandora was playing on my computer (and I was writing down the ones I liked to purchase on iTunes).
I don’t work from home everyday, sadly, because at work, the multitasking is even more frenetic. (Though not nearly so domestic.) The net result of all this activity was that a ten-minute read lasted about 90 minutes. And I’ll probably have to re-read parts of the article which slipped through my otherwise occupied brain.
More irony: We had dinner with good friends earlier this week at a restaurant in Boston. The subject got around to multitasking. One friend stated unequivocally that multitasking makes you dumber.
Later we sat listening to Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 in B minor performed beautifully by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Instead of just listening, of course, I was listening, reading about Tchaikovsky’s miserable end-of-life in the concert guide, and sneaking looks at my phone to find out what was going on in the Red Sox-Cleveland game. I ended up squeezing the phone against the concert guide too hard and accidentally called my son at home, so that “Hello, hello, hello” could plainly be heard in the middle of the third movement. (To the lady in front of me: Shame shame.)
And then I joined a few other misfits who clapped at the end of the next-to-last movement of the Symphony, an act punishable by death in Boston. (Note to Tchaikovsky: Change the order of the movements. It's obvious you mixed them up.)
So, he asked ironically, who really believes multitasking makes you dummer, eh, dumber?
Needless to say, multitasking, once ballyhooed as a staple of the modern digital executive, turns out to be a scourge. I have a love (for the efficiency) and hate (for the stupidity it creates) relationship with it. And I am clearly not alone. In fact, Walter Kirn’s article assures us that not only is multitasking offensive, but its end is near. And that’s good, because if you read the entire article, you’ll find that Kirn almost kills himself driving off the road while checking for phone pictures from his girlfriend.
Here are 11 take-aways:
1. To do two things at once is to do neither. —Publilius Syrus, Roman slave, first century B.C.And I want to apologize to the woman seated in front of me at the BSO earlier this week. That phone thing was an accident, but preventable. (At Multitaskers Anonymous we admit: I am a multitasker. I am dumber for it.) I also want you to know that the concert guide revealed that Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 in B minor, which premiered a few days before his death in 1893, turned out to be his masterpiece.
2. [So,] on to the next inevitable contraction that everybody knows is coming, believes should have come a couple of years ago, and suspects can be postponed only if we pay no attention to the matter and stay very, very busy. I mean the end of the decade we may call the Roaring Zeros—these years of overleveraged, overextended, technology-driven, and finally unsustainable investment of our limited human energies in the dream of infinite connectivity. . .
The Multitasking Crash.
The Attention-Deficit Recession.
3. “Where do you want to go today?” asked Microsoft in a mid-1990s ad campaign. The suggestion was that there were endless destinations—some geographic, some social, some intellectual—that you could reach in milliseconds. . .
This was the embryonic fallacy that grew up into the monster of multitasking. Human freedom, as classically defined (to think and act and choose with minimal interference by outside powers), was not a product that firms like Microsoft could offer, but they recast it as something they could provide. . .
Efficiency, convenience, and mobility.
For proof that these bundled minor virtues don’t amount to freedom but are, instead, a formula for a period of mounting frenzy climaxing with a lapse into fatigue, consider that “Where do you want to go today?” was really manipulative advice, not an open question.
“Go somewhere now,” it strongly recommended, then go somewhere else tomorrow, but always go, go, go—and with our help. . .
Everyone else was going places, it seemed, and either we started going places, too—especially to those places that weren’t places (another word they’d redefined) but were just pictures or documents or videos or boxes on screens where strangers conversed by typing—or else we’d be nowhere (a location once known as “here”) doing nothing (an activity formerly labeled “living”). What a waste this would be. What a waste of our new freedom.
Our freedom to stay busy at all hours, at the task—and then the many tasks, and ultimately the multitask—of trying to be free.
4. Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on.
What does this mean in practice? Consider a recent experiment at UCLA, where researchers asked a group of 20-somethings to sort index cards in two trials, once in silence and once while simultaneously listening for specific tones in a series of randomly presented sounds. The subjects’ brains coped with the additional task by shifting responsibility from the hippocampus—which stores and recalls information—to the striatum, which takes care of rote, repetitive activities. Thanks to this switch, the subjects managed to sort the cards just as well with the musical distraction—but they had a much harder time remembering what, exactly, they’d been sorting once the experiment was over.
Even worse, certain studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy.
5. The next generation, presumably, is the hardest-hit. They’re the ones way out there on the cutting edge of the multitasking revolution, texting and instant messaging each other while they download music to their iPod and update their Facebook page and complete a homework assignment and keep an eye on the episode of The Hills flickering on a nearby television. (A recent study from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 53 percent of students in grades seven through 12 report consuming some other form of media while watching television; 58 percent multitask while reading; 62 percent while using the computer; and 63 percent while listening to music. “I get bored if it’s not all going at once,” said a 17-year-old quoted in the study.) They’re the ones whose still-maturing brains are being shaped to process information rather than understand or even remember it.
6. This is the great irony of multitasking—that its overall goal, getting more done in less time, turns out to be chimerical. In reality, multitasking slows our thinking. It forces us to chop competing tasks into pieces, set them in different piles, then hunt for the pile we’re interested in, pick up its pieces, review the rules for putting the pieces back together, and then attempt to do so, often quite awkwardly. (Fact, and one more reason the bubble will pop: A brain attempting to perform two tasks simultaneously will, because of all the back-and-forth stress, exhibit a substantial lag in information processing.)
7. Much of the problem is the metaphor. Or perhaps it’s our need for metaphors in general, particularly when the subject is our minds and the comparison seems based on science. In the days of rudimentary chemistry, the mind was thought to be a beaker of swirling volatile essences. Then came classical physical mechanics, and the mind was regarded as a clocklike thing, with springs and wheels. Then it was steam-driven, maybe. A combustion chamber. Then came electricity and Freud, and it was a dynamo of polarized energies—the id charged one way, the superego the other.
Now, in the heyday of the microchip, the brain is a computer. A CPU. Except that it’s not a CPU. . .
The great spooky splendor of the brain, of course, is that no matter what we think it fundamentally resembles— even a small ethereal colosseum where angels smite demons and demons play dead, then suddenly spit fire into the angels’ faces—it does a good job, a great job, of seeming to resemble it.
For a while.
8. Here’s the worst of the chilling little thoughts that have come to me during micro¬tasking seize-ups: For every driver who’s ever died while talking on a cell phone (researchers at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis estimate that some 2,600 deaths and 330,000 injuries may be caused by drivers on cell phones each year), there was someone on the other end who, chances are, was too distracted to notice.
9. I’ve been fired, I’ve been insulted in front of co-workers, but the time I flew thousands of miles to meet a boss who spent our first and only hour together politely nodding at my proposals while thumbing out messages on a new device, whose existence neither of us acknowledged and whose screen he kept tilted so I couldn’t see it, still feels, five years later, like the low point of my career.
10. Six hundred and fifty billion dollars. That’s what we might call our National Attention Deficit, according to Jonathan B. Spira, who’s the chief analyst at a business- research firm called Basex and has estimated the per annum cost to the economy of multitasking-induced disruptions. (He obtained the figure by surveying office workers across the country, who reported that some 28 percent of their time was wasted dealing with multitasking- related transitions and interruptions.)
10. My hunch is that when we look back on it someday, at our juggling of electronic lives and the array of subtly different personas that each one encourages (we’re terse when texting, freewheeling on the phone, and in some middle state while e-mailing), the spectacle will appear as quaint and stylized as those scenes in old movies of stiff-backed lady operators, hair in bobby pins, rapidly swapping phone jacks from hole to hole as they connect Chicago to Miami, reporter to city desk, businessman to mistress. Such scenes were, for a time, cinematic shorthand for the frenzy of modern life, but then communications technology changed, and those operators lost their jobs.
To us.
11. "Where do you want to go today?” Microsoft asked us.
Now that I no longer confuse freedom with speed, convenience, and mobility, my answer would be: “Away. Just away. Someplace where I can think.”
Honestly, I can’t wait to hear it.
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