The Case for Single-Tasking

If you had to guess, how often do you think you switch between tasks on your e-devices, from Facebook to a Word document to a news site, back to your work on Word, then to your phone to answer a text, and back to Word for a bit before finding yourself looking up reviews of that new restaurant? Turns out, college students switch between windows on their laptops every 45 seconds, on average. Even more shocking is how long it might take us to refocus after a short distraction – up to 25 minutes. Some might call this multi-tasking (which have looked at in a previous post), but what’s really happening is better described as “rapid juggling” – and humans aren’t very good at it. We’re not really capable of doing two things simultaneously; our brain is actually going back and forth between the tasks, and that takes a lot of mental energy.

There’s been a lot of research over the past few years (and an excellent piece in The New York Times) about how this constant juggling of incoming information affects adults in the workplace, but recently researchers from the Departments of Informatics and Education at the University of California – Irvine have been working on figuring out how college students are affected as well. Not only does this rapid switching increase stress, but it also lowers our achievement, perhaps by 20%. That means that students who are trying to write a paper or take notes often have to use a lot more mental energy to finish the job than they should, because a lot of that energy is spent jumping around from window to window, or device to device. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon even found that the expectation of an incoming phone call or text can steal your focus enough to hurt your performance.

Interruptions to our mental focus and flow can come from others (email, texts, knocks on the door) or from ourselves (rapid juggling between windows), and the research shows we are our own most common interrupters. So how can college and high school students set themselves up for success and avoid a day of drained mental energy and too much tweeting? There are quite a few tips and resources for dealing with these habits.

•  Let your friends and family know you’re going to be busy during a specified time, and turn your phone on airplane mode during this time so calls and texts can’t get through. Turn off all other notifications for the time being as well. 

• Schedule your breaks, and make sure to indulge your human side – take a walk through nature, have a snack, or just look away from the screen and do some simple stretches. In between the breaks, stick to the one task at hand. 

• Consider using free software like kidlogger.net, which can make you aware of how often you’re switching, or an app that allows you to block yourself from certain websites for a set amount of time (StayFocused for Chrome, ColdTurkey for Windows, or SelfControl for Mac).

• Take the Infomagical Challenge from WNYC, which gives you a week full of tasks that will help you regain control over where you exert your mental energy. Day one starts with single-tasking. 

The Downside of Multitasking

How many other things are you doing while you read this blog? Listening to music or a podcast? Watching something streaming on a screen? Texting? Making a shopping list? You’re multitasking, the often highly valued ability to do more than one thing at a time. We all do it and are often quite proud of our juggling of multiple tasks. But are we really getting more done – and done better – this way?

The New York Times recently looked at the other side of multitasking – monotasking. It’s not the same as being mindfully aware of what you are doing. It’s simply doing one thing at a time without turning one’s attention to other tasks or distractions. It can be a matter of life and death when behind the wheel of a car, but today we will limit our discussion to other situations. Why does this matter? If we can do more than one thing at a time, doesn’t that make us more efficient and let us handle more information and be more productive? Not necessarily.

Studies have shown the downside to multitasking, including a recent study of workplace behavior that found that “shorter focus duration was associated with lower assessed productivity at day's end.” Another study, from 2014, found that turning from the task at hand to something else for just a few seconds doubled the errors that the study participants made in the primary task.

These studies have all dealt with adults in the workplace. But what about the impact of multitasking by students on their learning and studying? The findings here are disturbing. In one study, when researchers observed 263 middle school, high school, and college students studying for 15 minute blocks in their homes, they found that students started switching to other technology after less than six minutes, on average, into their study session. And these were students who were aware that their studying was being monitored. Those who interrupted their studying tended to have more technological distractors available to them and those who accessed Facebook while studying turned out to have lower GPAs. On a positive note, those students who used study strategies were more likely to stay on task.

An excellent survey of the research on this topic and on what the researchers think about how media and technology distractions affect learning can be found in an article on Mindshift, from KQED News. As with many behaviors parents want to impart to their children, modeling the target behavior can be an effective technique. If you want your child to be able to limit their multitasking to improve their learning and performance, you may decide that paying closer attention to a single task -- and explaining to your child what you are doing and why -- may help make this point.

photo credit: Craig Dennis via flickrcc