"The technology that was meant to liberate us has made life more hectic and challenging." - Vanella Jackson, Hall and Partners Professor Anthony Wagner, director of the Stanford Memory Laboratory, reviewed a decade of data on media multitasking, finding that “in about half of the studies, heavy media multitaskers are significantly underperforming on tasks of working memory and sustained attention”. Heavy users of multiple media (such as checking emails while scrolling through Instagram and watching TV) are particularly struggling to focus. It is this quieter mode of thinking that is increasingly difficult to master in our multimedia-driven world, where we are constantly inundated with electronic information demanding our attention. Underperforming in a multimedia-driven worldĪcademic and Nobel prize-winning behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman named the different types of thinking as System one – the fast, automatic thinking based on existing knowledge, and System two, the slower, effortful, deep thinking that requires some quiet space for the mind and is difficult to access when we are in a busy autopilot mode. While that might be fine if you’re attempting easy tasks such as photocopying and talking, or tidying your desk and listening to a podcast, research shows that when we attempt multiple, complex tasks, not only do we lose focus, we are also less able to make good decisions.
Neuroscientists explain that each time the brain switches activity, it then has to log in to the set of rules required to complete that task. That’s why most of us have creative thoughts when our minds are relaxed – just as we wake up, while on a walk or jog, or with a glass of wine,” Miki says. It’s like a pinball, when we jump between tasks, we don’t allow the brain to go into the deep thinking mode required for creativity and insight.
“What we’re actually doing is rapid task switching. “The word multitasking doesn’t really capture what is going on in our brains,” says Megumi Miki, leadership consultant. One thing all the scientists agree on is that our brains aren’t designed to handle more than one task at a time.
However, that’s proved a largely fallacious view, discredited by multiple studies published over the past decade. Multitasking – something that we do almost without thinking both at work and in leisure time – was once seen as a positive skill, cultivated by the most go-getting and efficient worker. That’s a three-way attention divide before you even start bringing in other distractions such as a colleague wandering over for a chat, or an email notification. Look around many offices, and it’s likely you will see employees staring at a computer screen while listening to music through earphones and occasionally glancing at a smartphone.
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