Episode 69: Multitasking

Transcript

When I was a teenager, I worked in a pizzeria.
I kind of worked the front counter, just ringing out customers or whatever.
But occasionally, I would actually work on the pizzas and stuff.
That was pretty fun.
But I worked the main pizza guy, the main guy that made the pizzas.
He was a bit of a character.
But one of the things he would point out to me, I stayed there for, I don't know, I shouldn't
say quite a while, but for a job as a teenager, I was there for a while.
You would see new hires come in, right?
And in order to get acquainted into, because it was a pizzeria attached to a restaurant
and then also shared a kitchen with like a bar and pub.
So it was sort of this, you know, multi-restaurant kind of thing.
And there tended to be a lot of stuff going on.
And most of the people they hired were people like me, right?
Like just teenagers, going to school, you know, working part-time at this place.
So when you first got in there, getting acquainted with that environment can be a little, you
know, overwhelming, I suppose, you know, because you're not, you might not be used to taking
rapid fire instructions and orders and demands from a bunch of different people.
Because a lot of times you might have the pizza guy yelling at you about one thing and someone
in the kitchen yelling about something else and some customer talking about something
else and like, you're sort of gay or, you know, or you find yourself in situations where
you need to do more than one thing at once and you have to kind of start somewhere.
So one of the things that this pizza guy likes to point out a lot was you, he would, and he
would pull me over and we, and like, you know, snicker about this to me.
Maybe there would be someone who the kitchen just asked them to go pick up an order, but
at the same time, the pizza guy had asked them to go and deliver a slice of pizza out
to a table.
So like there were sort of two competing things and they were in opposite directions, right?
So the person to go to the kitchen, you'd have to kind of go backwards, back to the kitchen
area.
And in order to go deliver the pizza slice, you have to go out forward into the actual
pizzeria area.
And sometimes these, you know, these people, I say these kids, but at the time they were
the same age as me, you'd see them just kind of like spin in a circle for a second, right?
Like they would like turn to go to the kitchen and then their brain would kick in.
Well, wait a minute.
What about the pizza slice?
And they would kind of turn back around and be like, wait a minute, I don't, I, but
I don't have the pizza slice.
Whereas the kitchen, they turn back around again.
So they kind of like do this little like 360 maneuver, like in the middle of the floor,
right?
For like a second or two until their brain caught up and like, they realized, wait a
minute, I have to do these one at a time.
I can't just do both.
And his point in pointing this out beyond just, you know, essentially hazing new hires, but
his point in pointing this out was that, um, you know, pick one thing.
Like you're, you're, when you're, when you need to do multiple things, you should pick
one thing and do that thing.
Cause if you try to do both, it's going to get all screwed up.
Now, this guy was not a particularly well-educated individual, like not, not a dumb guy.
I'm not saying he's a perfectly smart guy.
He just, you know, not a, he, he wasn't into psychological research or hadn't gone to
college or, you know, whatever.
Like he, he was, he was, he did, he put pizzas, you know, but as I've got, you know, as I progressed
through things and learned more about this subject, it's always that, that experience
always stuck out in my head because I, I sort of instinctively felt like he was correct.
Like when you have to do two or three things, even if they're not competing things, even
if they're just two or three disparate things, you have to kind of pick one and do that.
Otherwise everything gets all, your wires get crossed.
And, and so there's, there's a, you know, of course a whole debate around this to a certain
extent.
I will have arguments with people, not arguments, but, you know, discussions with people, my
wife being one of them about multitasking and my general belief, and I'm cheating a
little bit because I'm kind of giving away the end of this, but my general belief is
that multitasking doesn't actually exist.
You can't do it.
A person can't actually multitask, not with, with two or more things that require cognitive
focus, right?
So this is, this is not the, can you walk and chew gum?
Because walking and chewing gum are largely automated activities.
Like you don't need to think about them or intentionally do anything.
You just know how to do those things.
Once you've progressed to a certain point in life, you're not a toddler anymore.
You know how to walk.
You're not going to choke on the gum, you know, whatever, like you can do both things.
That's not what we're talking about here, but this is like the, oh, I'm going to work
on cutting the vegetables for dinner while also responding to a bunch of text messages.
Like that sort of thing.
Assuming that you find, it takes me forever to cut vegetables and it's very cognitive for
me.
Maybe other people are better at that, but that's an activity that requires focus for
me.
As I progressed through education, like a certain amount of education, it turned out this pizza
guy was absolutely correct.
You really can't multitask.
It's not a thing the brain does.
And there's a, there's quite a bit of research on this that indicates that when, when you try
to multitask or you think you're multitasking, what you're actually doing is just quickly
switching back and forth between the activities.
You're not actually doing both at once, although you might feel like you're doing both at once,
but instead you're, you're quickly switching back and forth between the activities.
For anyone who's a, you know, computer geek, your, your, your brain in this, in this context
for this metaphor is not much of a multi-core processor.
It is single threaded.
You can only, you can only, you can, no matter how good you are and how fast you are at switching
between activities, you can only really do one thing at a time when they both require
cognitive, some sort of focus on your part.
And the research has been pretty clear on this.
So a few things, right?
First of all, when you hear someone say I'm a great multitasker, I would call bullshit.
But that aside, aside from the like very petty, I told you so, um, the bigger thing is where,
where this becomes a problem because in theory, right, if you were able to quickly switch back
and forth between two activities, there really wouldn't be so bad.
You know, if let's say it would take you five minutes to do one active, I'm just gonna put
it in this time scale because it's a little easy to exemplify.
Okay, let's say it would take you five minutes to complete one activity and five minutes to
complete the other activity in isolation.
In theory, if you just switch back and forth and toggle between them, you put them together,
it takes 10 minutes.
It's no different, right?
So in theory, it doesn't really matter.
The problem is it's not really how it works.
What happens when you switch back and forth between two activities like this, every time
you switch, there is a little bit of cognitive mental overhead that is required for your brain
to realign with what the new thing is.
So if you're cutting vegetables over here and then all of a sudden you switch to a text message,
it takes your brain a second to almost, not literally a second, but some small period of
time to realize, okay, now I need to do the typing and reading thing, not the chopping thing.
And then when you go back, it's like, oh, wait a minute, now I've got to do the chopping
thing again.
And this leads to a few problems.
One, if you think about how that overhead builds up over time, back to our kind of example
of like five minutes to do this thing, five minutes to do that thing, in reality, it won't
be 10 minutes.
It'll be five and five.
So it'll be that 10 plus all of the accumulated overhead from switching back and forth.
So, and again, time is not the only thing here.
There's also quality and all kinds of other stuff, but I'm just kind of using as a very
easy kind of thing.
Let's say you accumulate an extra minute of overhead while you as a person feel like,
oh man, I was so efficient by multitasking these two things.
In reality, it would have gotten done faster if you had just done one at a time, because
there wouldn't have been this overhead of trying to switch back and forth.
This is also one of the problems, by the way, with like texting while driving and stuff like
that, but the other piece is not just time, but of course, quality and attention to detail.
And again, that mental overhead of switching back and forth reduces the quality of either
activity.
I bring all this up because A, I think as a general rule of thumb, it's probably a better
idea to try to do one thing at a time and then do the other thing.
But it raises an interesting question about when is it good to multitask?
And I would think the answer to that question is when you don't really care about either
thing you're doing.
And there are things in life where like you don't really care that much.
Like if you go through your day and really analyze certain activities, some of them are kind
of boring and you kind of lose your focus anyway.
And it doesn't really matter if they get done quickly or well.
And so maybe lumping some of those things together into kind of a multitasking session
might actually increase your natural interest in what you're doing simply because the activity
or that thing of switching back and forth provides some degree of interest above and beyond doing
one at a time.
But anyway, I think the overall point here is as a default mode, if you're finding that
maybe things are taking longer than you think they should, or maybe the quality isn't there
the way that you think it should, and you think to yourself, man, but I'm doing so much.
I'm so busy.
I'm doing like all these thousand things.
How come everything's taken forever and nothing seems to get done and it's not very good when
it is done?
Maybe examine how much you're trying to multitask and instead distill what you're doing down
to a single thing, do that thing, and then move on to something else.
Probably get better results.