Are you a multitasker? You’re probably not. Research says only about 2.5% of the population can truly multitask on anything more than walking and chewing gum. What you are is a task-switcher.
Task-switching is when we interrupt one task to attend to another—that’s what we’re actually doing when we think we’re multitasking. I catch myself doing this all the time because I’m as addled and distracted as much as anybody. I notice that I’m listening to a podcast, and if the podcast starts to get a little bit slow, I realize I’m opening my phone and trying to read an article. And I notice that “Oh, I just missed all of what happened in the podcast,” because I was toggled to the article, or vice versa.
The Science Behind Task-Switching
Our brains can pretty much only do one attention-based task at a time. Every time we need to switch from one to another, we pay a price and we pay in several different currencies.
1. Physical Cost
There’s an actual physical cost of switching from one thing to the next. Recent research of people in a bunch of different Fortune 500 companies in a bunch of different roles showed that the average person switches between inputs (different computer screens or software programs) 1,200 times a day—1,200! Some of the roles they looked at were well over 3,000 task switches every single day. At the 1,200 average, that’s costing about four hours just in the time it takes to go from one task to another. There’s a big physical cost.
2. Cognitive Cost
There’s also a huge cognitive cost—even bigger than the physical cost. Research shows that it reduces our efficiency, making us go a lot slower at task A and task B when we’re trying to do them both. It also reduces our quality—the quality slips in both A and B when trying to do both at the same time.
3. Emotional Cost
Task switching also has emotional costs. We can see that people’s frustration goes up. There’s a lot of emotional tax that we pay when we’re trying to attend to a bunch of things. There’s even the frustration of, “I feel like I can’t get anything done. I’m all over everywhere.” It’s very anxiety-provoking.
There are other costs too. Research shows we get worse at figuring out what’s irrelevant. Our filtering skills deteriorate as we try to do a bunch of things at the same time. All of a sudden, we’re just bobbing from one thing to another and not realizing that this thing doesn’t actually need our attention, or it certainly doesn’t need it right now. That filter gets a bit degraded, a bit crappy.
Your memory also declines. Anything that went in in one of these tasks probably didn’t stay in. That’s another huge cost.
Managing Task-Switching
There is a profound cost to task switching. It’s something you want to minimize. You want to create time blocks and use other time management tools to allow you to get to focus and flow where you can work effectively. And I get it’s hard to get there. The average employee is interrupted every 11 minutes and only returns to the initial task 25 minutes later. This means that we’re getting interrupted during our interruption. I know how hard it is to get to focus and flow, but that’s what really makes a difference.
For me, turning off all the notifications and using my very analog, old-fashioned time timer is a great way of saying, “I’m going to stay on task A.” It doesn’t mean I have to go all the way until it’s done, but I do want to get to a certain chunk of time so that I’m working in focus and flow before switching to something else.
The Creative Exception
Before we make it sound like this is very black and white, there’s one exception to the horrible impact of task switching in the research: creativity. It turns out that if you want to be more creative, you want to interrupt yourself.
One interesting study recently showed that you don’t want to interrupt yourself when you feel like interrupting yourself. You want to set a timer and interrupt yourself in the middle of something and switch to something else. When you do that, you become more creative at both tasks. Interestingly, people don’t do this naturally. They left people to try finding different ways to be more creative, and this isn’t one they came up with. But the data showed that when you interrupt yourself at a forced moment—so that you’re mid-thought—and switch to something else, you will benefit from greater creativity.
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If you’re in a creative job or trying to think outside the box, interruption, and task switching might be exactly what you need. But for the vast majority of us and the vast majority of tasks we do, task switching is slowing us down, I promise. You could get home sooner if you just focused on one thing at a time.
Here are more strategies for effective time management so you can get out of here and go do something fun:
A Personalized Approach to Feeling Less Overwhelmed
Why You Can (and Can’t) Multitask