The Fallacy of Multitasking

How many of you believe that you are capable of multitasking?  For the sake of this post, we will define multitasking as concomitant attention to two or more tasks or actions.  Agreed?  Great.

So back to the hands?  50%?  75% of you?  Try less than 5%.  In fact, researcher David Strayer of the University of Utah believes that as few as 2% of the population are what he terms a supertasker - those people who thrive in environments that require them to attend to multiple tasks in the same time window.

So what does that mean for the rest of us, as we drive, eat a breakfast sandwich, listen to the forecast on the radio, and text Mom to say we are sorry we haven't called in a while?  Doesn't that count??

Yes, and no.  Part of the problem is in the definition.  The fact is, you are not really doing those things simultaneously.  Your brain has to stop one task, shift, then start a new task.  The other side of the problem is a fallacy of success - the better we think we are at multitasking, the worse we actually perform!

So when you go to hit the microphone button on your cell phone keypad so you can tell people you never type while driving, you just stopped driving.  For those precious microseconds, your attention stopped routing to the task of driving, and shifted to the task of finding the right button to press.

Most of the time we get away with it, and therefore we tell ourselves that we are successful.  But do we really want our metric for success to include a failure option like a car accident?  I think not.

So, rather than being good multitaskers, we are actually practicing distraction.  Each time that we ask our brain to shift from one task to another, we are distracting ourselves from the task at hand.

NPR social science correspondent, Shankar Vedantam, recently posted a story about the phenomenon of distraction.  The brain, as amazing as it is, can take from as little as a minute to as much as 30 minutes to recover from an interruption.  We usually think of interruptions as things that happen to us, not things that we do to ourselves.  But in the digital age in which we live, with our notification preferences set to vibrate or to the "night owl" ringtone, do we really stand a chance?
Teachers face this battle every day.  In a 40-90 minute block of time, a teacher is engaged in a heated battle for the attention of their students.  The best of us limit those distractions we can control.  We don't have email notifications turned on, our cell phones are silent or put away, the print environment is functional, not busy nor intrusive.

But there are intercoms, student phones, noise in the hallway or outside the windows.  There are bathroom breaks, drink breaks, trips to the nurse.  We manage students that fidget, squirm, call out, and otherwise create interruptions from which we (and the class) need to recover.

Yet somehow, students learn.

I would love for teachers to respond to this post with your best techniques for managing the interruptions that are out of your control, and your proactive approaches to suffocating the opportunity for them to exist in the first place.  Maybe together we can keep the social scientists from asking us to wear shock helmets to bring us back to attention.

Thanks for listening,

CK

Do yourself proud, be a leader

My father, whose name I bear, had a saying he used to put into cards and letters from him to me.  He would sign off with this maxim: "Do yourself proud... be a leader."  As a teenager, and later as a young adult, I found pressure in those words.  Pride was something that other people have in you, not you in yourself.  If my father was to be proud of me, I would need good grades, trophies, achievements... I would need to be lauded in my endeavors.  Did my father say this to me?  No.  I made these assumptions up myself, and constrained my life with them ever since.  Being a leader?  That means things like being the team captain in sports, or class president.  Maybe jumping out of a foxhole and demanding that your fellow soldiers follow you forward, bullets whizzing by your head...  Turns out that's not what he was looking for either.  Once again, my assumptions at play.

It's now many years later, and I am close to the same age my father was when he first started using those words with me. I have my own family now, and they need my guidance to navigate a world that I see as vastly trickier and more dangerous than the one through which my father helped me.  I need advice to dole out.  I need wisdom to impart.  I need to know what I am doing.  There are small people who are counting on me to have the answers! I am also a teacher.  I made a career change after a number of years of job changing, and could not be happier in my chosen profession. But that means that I have a second family, a family of students, and they also count on me to be prepared, to know the answers, to have it together.  Yikes!

How did this happen?  And what am I going to do?!?

Carol Dweck is an omnipresent name in our present thinking about parenting, teaching, coaching... really anything that speaks to the human experience.  She brought us the term "growth mindset", and distinguished it from a fixed mindset.  Dweck tells us that we are all creatures with malleable characteristics and abilities.  Intellectual capacity is not fixed, as your IQ score might lead you to believe, but rather vibrant and dynamic.  Because of that, those of us with an internal locus of control, a sense of personal agency, can make ourselves into whatever we want.  That's a powerful notion, and for some, it's all they need to propel them into action.  For others, it may be even more daunting than the trauma of living out a "fixed mindset" life where we are static and stuck.  The weight of expectations can be a powerful inhibiting force.  If only there were some sage words... nothing fancy, no two dollar SAT vocabulary... just simple, truthful, direct.

My father got it in six words.  Six!  As his son, I listened with a different mindset and a different orientation toward life.  As an adult with my own children (both biological and academic) to raise, I listen to those words and think about the simple beauty in their message.  My job is to be the best me that I can be.  No one else can do it but me.  If I push myself, then I have made an accomplishment that moves me along my own trajectory.  If I hold a door open for the person behind me at the grocery store, then I have modeled positive behavior and acted as a leader.

We each have a path to follow.  Follow yours, and you will always be leading the way.

Thanks for listening.

CK