The 98: Multitasking Lies
I'd like to think I'm an inclusive and engaging teacher. I've only had someone walk out of my class in heated fashion one time (unless you count my time as a high school teacher in Detroit, which came with a whole host of its own challenges and interesting scenarios).
The reason for the walk out? I wouldn't budge on my statement that multitasking is a lie.
Here is the slightly less impactful but arguably more accurate version of that statement: what most people think of as multitasking is actually task switching that occurs so rapidly that it evades detection, and less than 2% of the population has the cognitive ability to actually multitask.
Multitasking is more harmful than most realize. It isn't just that you are inefficient in the moment; it can also negatively impact your memory. An ever-growing body of research demonstrates how multitasking leads to attention lapses which in turn lead to memory failure.
We can all think of examples where multitasking seems to occur without issue. You literally can walk and chew gum at the same time. Singer songwriters can carry a tune while strumming the guitar. Parents balance the pressing needs of their children by preparing dinner while stopping one kid from throwing something at another kid while making a mental note to buy more milk and another mental note to pay the credit card bill while yearning for the days when they actually had quiet time to themselves.
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Often, these situations conflate multitasking with automaticity—the ability to unconsciously perform a task without thinking about it. With enough practice or repetition, a task can be transformed from something requiring conscious brainpower to that which only demands unconscious brainpower.
And sometimes it isn't even automaticity. It is literally just that the person is switching between tasks that require conscious brainpower so quickly that they could not possibly measure the cognitive impact of trying to do both things at once.
Multitasking is endlessly tempting. As Oliver Burkeman put it, “It offers the false promise that we might somehow slip the bonds of our finitude. We tell ourselves that with sufficient self-discipline, plus the right time-management tricks, we might finally ‘get on top of everything’ and feel good about ourselves at last. This utopia never arrives, of course, though it often feels as if it might be just around the corner.”
But you are Bound in Finitude (capitalized to showcase that this is an incredible name for a band that takes itself too seriously). The sooner you acknowledge that you’re almost certainly part of the 98% who cannot multitask, the sooner you can build a system that is built around the brain you actually have, not the one you wish you had.
You, like me, are part of the 98. And that, my friend, is completely okay.
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p.s. And here, once again, is the AI-generated image WordPress made based on the text of my post, which it suggests I use as my featured image. Deep Sigh.
