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A dazzling claim has fallen into my entry tray. A quarter of the British, according to a new survey, are sending emails from the loo, because they are very pressured by time. “Relaxing is a thing of the past,” laments the press release, which says that a third of respondents continue to work on their phones at night, “while watching their television programs.” Ah.
With “overwhelming” a characteristic of modern life, reports like this that imply that harassed workers are forced to perform multiple tasks to keep abreast of balloons. But when 13 percent of respondents admit to having made a weekly online store during a business meeting, I wonder what happened to their boss. Have we reached the domestic peak, in which meetings are now a performative complement to real life: walking the dog and cleaning the house, what the survey of this survey had done while they were on work calls?
Multitasking defenders like to remind us that Archimedes had its moment Eureka while in the bathroom. But he was letting his mind wandered as he soaked. He was not sitting there with his camera outside, trying not to splashed while others advanced.
Recently I asked a painter for an appointment for a decoration. We spent chatting while he took a look at several walls. From the pandemic, he told me that he has been amazed by the frequency with which he arrives at a house to find adult men sitting on his sofas, watching sport in the middle of the day while vaguely takes advantage of his keyboards. This puts a new “excess work” complexion.
In these days, if you do only one thing at a time, you think you are a fishing party. But 20 years of evidence tell us that the change in tasks makes most people dull. A study by the UTAH University of 2006 found that talking on the phone while driving is as dangerous as being drunk: it slows down the reactions. The same team has reported more recently than the “infotainment” systems of cars are even more dangerous than phones in terms of distraction.
Our brains are mainly connected to do one thing at a time. Even walking and speaking begins to be complicated when we get old. This does not mean that life has to be a monotonous sequence. Many workers enjoy alternating between tasks, according to the Center for Care Studies, at King’s College London, and can be positive. In fact, the “intercalation”, changing between themes and then returning to them later, is fashionable in schools as a proven technique for review of the exams.
But the growing levels of anxiety mean that it is important to convert the conversation to concentrate. The difficulty in concentrating is highly correlated with some of the anxiety disorders recognized by the American Psychiatry Association. And we tend to overestimate our ability to perform multiple tasks. In fact, the most prone to juggling should do so less: because studies show that they are more impulsive and have less executive control.
I’m afraid I fall in that last group, but I have recently found two simple hacks. I tried to verify the email only twice a day, but that does not adapt to my personality or my working life. Instead, I have written a list of pending tasks. The existence of the list releases my brain from anguish, as long as the tasks are detailed enough. And using pencil and paper seems to print it more deeply in my subconscious. This is backed by new research that considers that we make more elaborate brain connections when we write than when we write. These connections are crucial for memory formation, and this makes it imperative to keep children with hand writing.
I am also testing what Cal Newport, in his book Slow productivityCall an “extraction system.” Essentially, you focus ruthlessly on your three main projects and dodge as much as possible in premature communication, meetings on meetings and messages on meetings related to subsequent projects. Only when you have finished one of your first three, you go up the next in that slot.
We will all have different versions of this system, and I suppose it could be called “focus.” But following my own version has made me reflect the frequency with which the distinction is lost between the work that really generates income, drives things and makes sense; and work that is a process. With which I refer to pre-reaunion, the compliance training module, the email chain of “responding everything” in response, etc. The first type of work is much more satisfactory. The second good may be The guy that office workers report on the walk through the dog and the bathroom, and what my new decorating friend says that he is happy to have less in his physical work.
I suspect that such process tasks are more pleasant if they are held with a music background, texts, moving or intermittently reviewing the football score. The problem is that people who change among multiple channels, called heavy media multitasking by Stanford researchers, show a worse memory and a lower executive control, even when they focus on a single job.
It turns out that there are some “superstocaries”, those that can handle multiple tasks without losing efficiency. In cerebral scans, this group exhibits less brain activity, no more, when additional tasks are added. Unfortunately, only about 2 percent of us are in that category. Therefore, it would be friendlier for us and for our employers to recognize that the stretches of attention are not infinite and treat them carefully.