Avoiding Switch-Tasking

 

I was on a conference call—the executive committee of a not-for-profit board on which I sit—and decided to send an email to a client.

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I know, I know. You’d think I’d have learned.

In chapter 32, “The One-Two Punch,” I wrote about the dangers of multitasking—using a cell phone while driving—and I proposed a way to stop.

But right now I wasn’t in a car. I was safe. At my desk. What could go wrong?

Well, I sent him the email. Then I had to send him another one, this time with the attachment I had forgotten to append. Finally, my third email to him explained why that attachment wasn’t what he was expecting. When I eventually refocused on the call, I realized I hadn’t heard a question the chair of the board had asked me. I swear I wasn’t smoking anything.

But I might as well have been. A study showed that people distracted by incoming email and phone calls saw a ten-point fall in their IQ. What’s the impact of a ten-point drop? The same result as losing a night of sleep. More than twice the effect of smoking marijuana.

Doing several things at once is a trick we play on ourselves, thinking we’re getting more done. In reality, our productivity goes down by as much as 40 percent, because we don’t—and can’t—multitask. We switch-task. Rapidly shifting from one thing to another, interrupting ourselves unproductively, losing time in the process.

You might think you’re different. That you’ve done it so much you’ve become good at it. Practice makes perfect and all that.

But you’d be wrong. The research shows that heavy multitaskers are less competent at it than light multitaskers. In other words, in contrast to almost everything else in your life, the more you multitask, the worse you are at it. Practice, in this rare case, works against you.

So I decided to experiment for a week. No multitasking. I wanted to see what happened, which techniques helped, and whether I could sustain it.

For the most part, I succeeded. When I was on the phone, all I did was the phone. In a meeting, I did nothing but focus on the meeting. Any interruptions—email, phone, a knock on the door—I held off until I finished what I was working on.

When I emerged at the end of the week, I discovered six things:

First, it was delightful. I noticed this most dramatically when I was with my children. I shut my cell phone off and found myself much more deeply engaged and present with them. I never realized how significantly a short moment of checking my email disengaged me from the people and things right there in front of me. Don’t laugh, but I actually—and for the first time in a while—noticed the beauty of leaves blowing in the wind.

Second, I made significant progress on challenging projects. The kind that require thought and persistence. The kind I usually try to distract myself from, like writing or strategizing. Since I refused to allow myself to get distracted, I stayed with them when they got hard, and experienced a number of breakthroughs.

Third, my stress level dropped dramatically. The research shows that multitasking isn’t just inefficient, it’s also stressful. And I found that to be true. It was a relief to do one thing at a time. I felt liberated from the strain of keeping so many balls in the air at each moment. It felt reassuring to finish one thing before going to the next.

Fourth, I lost all patience for things I felt were not a good use of my time. An hour-long meeting seemed interminably long, and a meandering, pointless conversation was excruciating. In other words, I became laser-focused on getting things done. Since I wasn’t doing anything else, I got bored much more quickly. I had no tolerance for wasted time.

Fifth, I had tremendous patience for things I felt were useful and enjoyable. When I listened to Eleanor, I was in no rush. When I was brainstorming a difficult problem, I stuck with it. Nothing else was competing for my attention, so I was able to settle into the one thing I was doing.

Sixth, and perhaps most important, there was no downside. Nothing was lost by not multitasking. No projects were left unfinished. No one became frustrated with me for not answering a call or failing to return an email the second I received it.

Which is why it’s surprising that multitasking is so hard to resist. If there’s no downside to stopping, why don’t we all just stop?

I think it’s because our minds move considerably faster than the outside world. You can hear far more words a minute than someone else can speak. We have so much to do, why waste any time? While you’re on the phone listening to someone, why not use that extra brainpower to book a trip to Florence?

What we neglect to realize is that we’re already using that brainpower to pick up nuance, think about what we’re hearing, access our creativity, and stay connected to what’s happening around us. What we neglect to realize is that it’s not extra brainpower. It may be imperceptible, but it’s all being used, right then and there, in the moment. And diverting it has negative consequences.

So how do we resist the temptation to multitask?

First, the obvious: The best way to avoid interruptions is to turn them off. Often when I’m writing, I’ll do it at 6 AM. when there’s nothing to distract me. I’ll disconnect my computer from its wireless connection, and I’ll turn my phone off. In my car, I’ll leave my phone in the trunk. Drastic? Maybe. But most of us shouldn’t trust ourselves.

Second, the less obvious: Use your loss of patience to your advantage. Create unrealistically short deadlines. Cut all meetings in half. Give yourself one-third the time you think you need to accomplish something.

Because there’s nothing like a deadline to keep things moving. And when things are moving fast, we can’t help but focus on them. How many people run a race while texting? If you truly have only thirty minutes to finish that presentation you thought would take an hour, are you really going to answer that call?

Interestingly, because multitasking is so stressful, single-tasking to meet a tight deadline will actually reduce your stress. In other words, giving yourself less time to do things could make you more productive and more relaxed.

Finally, it’s good to remember that we’re not perfect. Every once in a while, it might be okay to allow for a little multitasking. As I was finishing this chapter, Daniel, my two-year-old son, walked into my office, climbed on my lap, looked up at me with a smile, and said, “I want to watch Monsters, Inc., please.”

So here we are. I’m writing this sentence on the left side of my computer screen while Daniel is on my lap, watching a movie on the right side.

Sometimes, it really is simply impossible to resist a little multitasking.

We don’t actually multitask. We switch-task. And it’s inefficient, unproductive, and sometimes even dangerous. Resist the temptation.