09 Nov Multi-Tasking Hurts Your Brain
Yikes. New technology and busy schedules are making it increasingly more difficult to focus on one task at a time. And, even if you’re well-practiced, it may not be surprising that multi-tasking reduces productivity. But, new research shows it also may impair your cognitive ability, permanently. In the August 24 edition of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Abstract), Clifford Nass and others at Stanford have shown that multi-tasking reduces productivity, and also cognitive ability.
They found that, when test subjects are in situations where there are multiple sources of information coming from the external world or emerging out of memory, they’re less able to filter out what’s not relevant to their current goal. That failure to filter slows them down because they are unable to ignore irrelevant information. Frequent multi-tasking, such as keeping up with incoming email while reviewing a document and listening to music, may actually decrease your ability to filter through information later, even when you are not multi-tasking.
A few years ago I attended a course at MIT Sloan on Product Portfolio Management, taught by Dr. Rebecca Henderson. Part of the material Dr. Henderson presented included results from research on engineer productivity as a function of the number of projects the engineer was juggling at once. On reading the recent Stanford research, it struck me that media multi-tasking is probably not that different from juggling multi-project activities, and that proper management of multiple simultaneous projects should include focusing on one thing at a time, as recommended by the Stanford group. The MIT-cited productivity data looked something like the plot below, showing that productivity peaks at about two assigned projects, and falls rapidly away as the assigned projects approach 4 and beyond. It probably goes without saying that the best people on a team will end up with the most projects. If possible, don’t let that number of projects exceed 2 or 3.
Now, back to my other tasks…
Research results on an engineer's productivity as a function of the number of projects they're working on.
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