The Wall Street Journal
CUBICLE CULTURE
By JARED SANDBERG
Yes, Sell All My Stocks.
No, the 3:15 From JFK.
And Get Me Mr. Sister.
September 12, 2006; Page B1
A few months ago, Victor Grillo, the chief executive of a marketing company, was in his office doing two things at once -- neither of them very well. He was on the phone booking a vacation in Mexico while also composing an email to four of his lieutenants about the need to fire a fifth. He sent the email, and was continuing with his travel agent. All of a sudden, he "got the nagging feeling that something wasn't right." His "Sent" messages folder revealed he had inadvertently sent the message to the person on the block. In a panic, Mr. Grillo hastily told the travel agent to finish booking the trip. He then made a mayday call to IT. Too late; an angry R-rated email soon arrived from the canned employee. And when he got to Mexico, Mr. Grillo learned he'd been booked into a presidential suite at $3,000 a night.
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Multitasking, a term cribbed from computers, is an information age creed that, while almost universally sworn by, is more rooted in blind faith than fact. It's the wellspring of office gaffes, as well as the stock answer to how we do more with less when in fact we're usually doing less with more. What now passes for multitasking was once called not paying attention. Today's workers typically have to do three things while arguing on the phone with a spouse. David Gardner, who writes instructional material for trainers, now knows better than to try. He once worked for a marketing company stretched so thin it sent 4,000 nuns direct mail offers addressed "Dear Mr. Sister." Employers continue to seek out jugglers despite decades of research showing that humans aren't great multitaskers. (And in the case of distracted driving, we're downright dangerous.)
(snip)
Researchers say analytical thinking can happen in parallel, as long as the tasks have been practiced. But the amount of practice is "too high for the practical world," says Dr. Johnston. And that wouldn't include, say, responding to emails, which requires "fantastically more cognition" than the much simpler tasks often included in multitasking research... But the religion of multitasking still holds sway. Just a few days ago, an oil refinery, the sort of place you'd hope everyone would be super-focused, posted a help-wanted ad for an engineer that could multitask. At the same time, an insurance company sought to fill a position requiring "multitasking while answering heavy amounts of phone calls."
(snip)
Something else left out of the multitasking calculations -- beside the fact that we don't do it very well -- are "resumption costs." These are the seconds it takes your brain to say "Where was I?" when resuming an interrupted task. Depending on the tasks, those resumption costs can be high enough to make it faster to unitask, which researchers say produces better performance in the first place. While multitaskers seem to be accomplishing a lot, they are in most cases literally just going through the motions. It is easy for our brain to schedule many different tasks, one after the other. And we'll gamely set out doing those tasks, some of which require little extra brain input and some of which require a lot. As a result, says Hal Pashler, director of the Attention and Perception Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, "your mouth can be moving while your brain is elsewhere."
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