Deep Dive Into Multitasking Part 2
As always, when we're talking about multitasking, what we're really talking about is task switching - that is when we're trying to multitask we're not actually doing two things at the same time, instead, we're just switching back and forth between things. And what we're really focused on is two cognitive tasks. Some studies have found that we are capable of doing a familiar physical task while also doing something cognitive - although there can still be a drop in performance there as well... like when we see people talking on their cellphone's walking into signs and poles.
With this task-switching comes a switching cost - so every time we switch what we're focusing our attention we're experiencing this cost. This cost comes at us in a few ways. In last week's episode, we had our experiment that helped demonstrate how multitasking actually makes us take longer to perform a task and I also mentioned how I felt like I was likely to make more errors during the test.
And that's what a lot of articles on multitasking focus on - that multitasking gives us a pretty heavy hit to our productivity. And even then the research often gets misinterpreted. A common statistic that I saw while doing my research for this episode was that it can take 23 minutes to refocus after an interruption. This seemed off to me. Remember, often when we're switching between tasks it only takes us milliseconds to refocus.
I mean even while I was working on this paragraph I got a phone call from my wife and then resumed my writing. After the phone call, it didn't take me 23 minutes to refocus on writing, I kind of just got back into it. The issue is that the 23-minute statistic is actually about how long it took to resume the task they were working on after the interruption and including the time to finish the interrupting task. So if we look at that phone call with my wife that was about 5 minutes on the call, then another 5 minutes to send an email based on that call... for roughly 10 minutes until I refocused on writing... but I wouldn't really call that needing 10 minutes to refocus, it just took 10 minutes to get back to what I was doing after dealing with the interruption.
And here's the other thing that these productivity hackers missed from that study after only 20 minutes of interrupted work, people reported significantly higher stress, frustration, workload, effort, and pressure. Other studies have found an increase in the level of sadness and fear participants felt after multitasking. Even if multitasking did make us more productive those factors might make us seriously question if the improved productivity was worth it... but we don't even get the supposed productivity boost, it's just all bad.
There are biological costs to multitasking - we're burning up oxygenated glucose at a faster rate. The brain uses glucose to fuel all its cellular activities and as we burn through our reserves we find ourselves feeling tired and less able to stay on task. And this is all made worse by the fact that we have ADHD. Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop. We're wired to want to get that novelty that multitasking can give us.
If we break down the process of multitasking, what we have going on when we switch tasks is that we're juggling how, when, and in what order we're doing these tasks. All of that is managed through our executive functions - which of course is something else ADHD brains have trouble dealing with. This not only means that we're more likely to try to engage in multitasking, but that we're also more like to kind of suck at it. I know there are a lot of people that believe that multitasking is an ADHD superpower, but in reality, we just don't understand how bad we really are at it.
I do want to give a caveat to ADHD multitasking... there are times when it can be good for us to semi-multitask... and I'm hedging a little here because I want to make sure that I'm clear that people understand that I am not talking about performing two cognitive tasks at the same time. What I'm talking about are things like fidgets that can help us engage just a little bit of our nervous energy and can help us keep our focus on what we want to be focused on. Or how many of us find that we can focus better when listening to music - of course, this also depends greatly on the music. We're better off listening to something without lyrics... and if we're streaming it definitely helps if we're able to have an option without commercials. Part of this is that we're blocking out distractions around us that might otherwise grab attention, but when we're listening to the right kinds of music we can engage the part of our brain that usually distracts us.
And again, these things don't really feel like multitasking - if just idly playing with a fidget cube while listening to a lecture we probably wouldn't think of it as doing two distinct tasks. Nor do we often think of listening to music as a distinct separate task from whatever else we're doing (although I certainly ran into some audiophile forums that take issue with that idea). This kind of multitasking actually works great with the ADHD brain, it's just when we try to delve into more cognitive tasks that we get in trouble.
One of the most pervasive forms of multitasking has become multimedia multitasking → this is where we're consuming two forms of media at the same time. I touched on this briefly last episode, but I think it's something we can really expand into because it's becoming more and more prevalent and it's also definitely something that I struggle with.
Just imagine that you're sitting down to watch some TV... is that the only thing you're doing, or are you also pulling out your phone? This has become so commonplace that we often don't even think about it... of course, we're going to be doing something else while we're watching TV.
Or how about in those zoom meetings... so convenient that I can minimize the window and still have the active speaker screen go up into the corner. Now I can look at stuff on Amazon while I'm in this boring meeting. Or even if the meeting isn't boring maybe I'm just going to do it anyway because I can. Except then I get asked, "Hey Will, what do you think about that?" and then suddenly I realize I haven't been paying nearly as much attention as I thought I was.
It might seem fine to be playing a game on your phone while watching the latest episode of WandaVision, but as switch back and forth between the game and watching the show there is a cost for every time your focus changes. Now, this is a small cost to be sure, but let's say you're changing your focus every few seconds while watching 30 minutes of a show. Suddenly that small cost has snowballed into a much larger cost.
This is the same deal we have with texting and driving, we think that we're paying much better attention than we really are. Even if the cost seems minuscule, it's the cumulative effect that we're actually worried about.
No matter what we do we're going to be doing some task switching throughout the day... there's just no getting around the fact that we don't have any singular tasks that we do straight all day long. But what we're worried about is that our cognitive switching penalty is an issue of friction - the more we switch, the higher the cost. So it's fine that I'm going from task to task throughout the day getting things done. What I don't want to is to move the slider of this cognitive switching penalty to the extreme. That's where we start seeing our decline in performance and our emotional dysregulation.
I understand the urge to grab your phone, laptop or tablet when your watching TV - sometimes TV just isn't stimulating enough to keep me occupied while I'm watching. But here's the thing about media multitasking... it's still multitasking and it still creates those switching costs when we switch from one task to another... except when we're doing it while watching TV we're often doing it for a prolonged session. We're essentially binge multitasking and that creates a much bigger strain on our system than our typical multitasking does throughout the day.
We also want to be fair in that typically neither watching TV nor scrolling Instagram are particularly complex or taxing activities... that's part of the appeal of media multitasking, it can feel like we're getting a bit more engaged in what we're doing. But studies have found that media multitasking is associated with depression and social anxiety - now to be sure this is only correlational data, but it makes sense with how multitasking taxes our system. And we tend not to notice these costs as they build up.
When we first sit down to watch something we're not engaged in yet, so out comes the phone... and then we never really give ourselves the chance to really engage with the show, we're just engaged with our phone with the TV on as background noise.
One of the biggest appeals of multitasking is that we don't have to prioritize what we want to do - why choose between scrolling Instagram and watching TV when you can just do both at the same time. But as we've seen this isn't as good of a compromise as we tell ourselves. We're not getting nearly as much out of either experience and draining ourselves of our mental energy.
Our solution here is that we do have to prioritize what we want to do. If I want to watch a TV show with my wife in the evening then that means I shouldn't be taking my phone with me over to the couch. If I "need" something to do while getting into the show then maybe I should grab a fidget or try and do a little stretching. Bringing over the phone is only a signal that I'm not going to be engaged... that I might actually rather be doing something else.
And this can be a hard habit to break.
So another aspect of curing ourselves of multitasking is mindfulness - just checking in with how you feel. More than anything, the reason we're not noticing these drains is because we're not paying attention... and also because we're feeling drained. What we can do instead is work on being more intentional about choosing how we're going to consume our media - I know there isn't enough time to do everything... but that's okay. I'm not going to watch all the shows, I'm not going to see all the posts and I'm not going to play all the games. Don't feel bad about what you're not "caught up to" because no one is caught up to everything. Spend more time engaging in your media and actually enjoying it. If what you're watching isn't engaging enough maybe think about watching something else - because again, we've got limited time, choose stuff that is going to make that time worthwhile for you.
As I mentioned in the last section, one of the best cures for multitasking is mindfulness. This can be a hard state for ADHDers to get into because, well, we get distracted. But that's okay. Mindfulness isn't about being focused and keyed in all the time, it's just about cultivating a sense of awareness to what we're doing. We're not always going to be mindful of what we're doing, but as we go through our day we can start asking questions like: Am I doing what I want to be doing
When we're multitasking we're giving into all those little distractions that come up and we're not staying on task.
So how can we do this? Well, one of the first steps we want to take in this process is defining what we're supposed to be doing. Because it doesn't matter if we ask the question "am I doing what I want to be doing?" if we don't know what the answer to that question is. If I'm productively procrastinating it can feel like I'm doing the right things even though I'm just putting off those important tasks that would be better for me to focus on.
For years when I'd want to start working on something, I'd find myself sitting down with only a vague idea of what I was supposed to be working on. And this usually happens at the source of our planning, our to-do list. If we write down just the vaguest idea of what we're supposed to be working on we find ourselves scrambling to find that first step when we're supposed to start working.
If we instead have that first step defined for us then we're going to be a lot better off when we sit down to do our work. Just imagine opening up your to-do list and it has just the word taxes written on it. Okay, well I know what that means kind of. It means I'm going to be doing something that I don't really want to be doing. But more specifically than that... well it doesn't mean much. Am I gathering forms? Am I filling our forms or emailing my accountant or am I... I don't even know, because that kind of to-do is just waaay too vague. Of course, we also write to-do's like this when we don't know what we're supposed to do. Also, this isn't really a to-do, it's a project and projects are going to take a number of steps to complete. When I jot down something like taxes, I'd be much better served with a to-do that outlines what really needs to happen, which in this case is to write out everything that needs to happen for me to get through my taxes. And again be specific about what you want to do - so something like "brainstorm what I need to do for my taxes" or "list out steps for completing my taxes" or maybe "call my accountant for steps on completing my taxes" - because if I don't even know where to start it's a good sign that I might need to ask for help.
Now, this doesn't have to always happen. Sometimes we can trust our future selves to know what needs to happen when we schedule something. When I'm doing my weekly and daily planning I know that I'm going to be fine with some of the things I do fairly regularly. I can put down on my to-do list something like Work on Multitasking Script because future me isn't going to get confused about what I need to do there.
But this can lead us into some trouble because our current brain also thinks that we can get away with this for simple tasks. One of the things I dropped on my to-do list is that I need to email my accountant. Well. Okay. That might be enough to remind future me about what needs to happen, but it also might not. I might sit there and look at the to-do and think okay, well I want to email my accountant, but, you know, why? So when I added that todo I also included that it was about taxes and specifically the question I wanted to ask them.
I know this can feel like a lot of work upfront in our planning but it pays off in that we can actually get through the things on our to-do lists. And let's also think about how this works in terms of multitasking... why write down that question when I could just quickly shoot off that email? Well, because I'm working on planning right now, not on emailing someone. There's a good chance that if I open my inbox there is going to be something else in there that I might have to deal with. Or maybe there's just an interesting newsletter that I'll click on. The point of planning is so that I can get all the junk out of my head at one time and then go about the process of doing the things that need to get done. If I'm just trying to do things as they pop in my head, I'm going to end up multitasking and I'm more likely to forget about some of those things I need to plan out for my day. By doing all my planning upfront I can save myself time later in the day when I wouldn't know what to do.
Along with this idea that we want to be specific about what we're doing so that we're not multitasking, we also want to think about what we shouldn't be doing. By creating a not-to-do list it's easier for us to focus on the things we want to be focusing on. This list does not have to be exhaustive... I mean there are a lot of things that I should not be doing right now... but most of them I don't really have to worry about. I'm not going to suddenly get the urge to call my dentist while working on this script for example. But I might get the urge to surf Reddit or check my email → those are things that should absolutely go on my not-to-do list.
A strategy that can go nicely along with this is having a bit of a startup ritual where maybe you put on some focusing music, set your device to do not disturb and then write out what you are going to be focused on and then also write out those things that you aren't doing. I used to have a whiteboard at my desk that had two columns, one column was doing and the other was not-doing and it was an easy way to remind me what I wanted to be working on and what I really needed to avoid.
And as I said, the not-doing list shouldn't be exhaustive, but we still might find ourselves coming up with bright and shiny new distracting thoughts as we work. Maybe I do realize that I want to call my dentist because suddenly I realized that I haven't had an appointment all pandemic and I really don't want my teeth to rot out of my head. Well, I shouldn't call them right then, but I also know that if I don't get this thought out of my head it's going to plague me until I do something about it... I could pull out my planner and add it there, but that could be pretty distracting too. Instead, what I'd suggest here is just have a place to write down those errant thoughts that pop into your head while you're working. This can be a sheet of paper you keep next to you while you're writing or just some sticky notes that you keep on your desk. The important part is that after you're done with what you're working on you can then go over those things you wrote down and do something about them, either adding them to your calendar or where ever you need the reminder. And this is a critical step because if you're writing things down and not following up then you're going to stop trusting your system and that's just going to lead you to stop using it.
This Episode’s Top Tips
Multitasking has both cognitive and biological costs that accumulate as we do more and more task switching. These costs can be especially hard on those of us with ADHD because they can serve to drain our executive functions.
Multimedia multitasking is one of the worst ways we can multitask because often we're essentially binge multitasking where we multitask for a sustained period and really drain our systems.
One of the biggest appeals to multitasking is that we don't have to prioritize what we're doing, we can just choose to do both. To help stave off multitasking work on knowing what your priorities are and create systems where you can focus on just doing those things.
One of our best defenses against multitasking is mindfulness - if we can be specific about what we want to do and then become aware of what we are doing throughout the day we can help ourselves focus on doing just one thing at a time.
