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