Multitasking
Are we as unproductive as we feel with modern technology?
For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email podcast@alephinsights.com
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast, produced by Tell Me Studios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Peter Coghill, Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. And this week we're discussing multitasking. So Nick, what's your problem with multitasking?
Speaker B:Well, I've just been on holiday because it's been Christmas. And yeah, I just I noticed that being on holiday, being out, not connected to Wi-Fi for some of it, and then being in a fairly isolated place in Norfolk. And yet still, you know, I had email to check. I had things I could sort of get on with. I had a list of tasks which was massively optimistic because you can't get anything done over Christmas. And, you know, and then I had to sort of look at those tasks and make sure I wasn't missing any of them and shunt them forward appropriately. And it just occurred to me, you know, this is not this is this is not technology making my life easier. This is technology imposing a large amount of burden on me that, you know, shouldn't be the case. Life should be easier. And I just and I feel like I what, you know, used to be you would think I need to do this thing and you would do it. Now there is just quite a lot of it's there's a perpetual in tray, you know, of emails to check of Facebook notifications to check of reminders of renewal of subscriptions to renew of, you know, of all these things that you have to do. And I don't like and we've said multitasking. That's a misnomer. I mean, it's really task switching is what we're talking about. Switching, doing one thing and replying to an email and getting back to the thing you were writing and then having to, you know, make a phone call and then having to, you know, update your calendar because of some other thing that's happened. And I hate that. I mean, I have to do it. I do it all the time. But it just feels very unproductive to me. And I just wonder if technology is going to make that better or worse.
Speaker A:Well, let's clarify things here, because for a moment. Yeah, I feel, you know, rather led up the garden path with this subject, because we're actually not talking about multitasking. As you correctly say, we're talking about, hey, haven't we got loads of stuff to do because of technology?
Speaker B:Well, yeah, it's also the fact that you have to switch between media so much, you know, it's not a matter of here's my letters, I'm going to reply to the letters today. It's got to check my phone, got to check to do something online, got to open up a thing, got to log into something else, got it, you know, it's just a whole different tasks all the time, different types of tasks.
Speaker A:Yeah. I mean, also, I think it's an interesting topic. And it's actually because something that's I often feel like that. And I felt like that. And I thought it was I felt like this for the last four or five years. And I always thought it's because it's in those four or five years that I became freelance. And suddenly, I've got more stuff to do. And I don't have such a defined period of time that is work. But actually, that four or five years probably coincides with the introductions of things like, you know, smartphone, for example. Yeah, Chris.
Speaker C:Yeah, I was just gonna say, I think it's, it's important to distinguish between being overloaded with activities that you have to do, and switching between different activities and the different, you know, you can be saturated doing one, one task, if you know, somebody gives you, you know, 100 dishes to wash in, in two seconds, you know, you can't, you can't complete that task. But it's more, I think what Nick's getting at is this, this issue of what most people call multitasking, but it's actually tasks, task switching, because we know, actually, humans can't really do multitasking, they can't, you know, concentrate on two activities simultaneously. But what we tend to refer to as multitasking is where you're doing activities sort of, in parallel where you have you switch between them. And it's the inefficiencies that are created by that switching, you know, you're having to change from doing one thing using, you know, WhatsAppping your friends through to doing a Google search on your, on your computer or whatever. It's, it's the inefficiencies that are created by switching between different types of tasks and activities that are creating the, the problem really here. And I think new technologies do tend to lend themselves, there are much more things you can, you can have lots of browser windows open in a way that with, you know, older media, you couldn't, you couldn't do all of these things simultaneously, you had to go somewhere else to open a book on something and sit down and do it for a period of time or go to the library or whatever. But now we can have all of these activities running simultaneously. And it's very easy to never quite complete any of them to feel I've just done a bit of that one. Oh, now there's something pinged over here and I'm distracted and, and so on. And I think that's, that's where the kind of cognitive loading the burden is,
Speaker D:is coming from. Peter? I yeah, I sort of the task switching thing. I think there's an interesting dimension where there's a few, view your tasks, say we've got multiple projects running. And within each project, there are tasks. And with each of those tasks are sort of subtasks. So interesting sort of hierarchical thing. And I think a lot of the burden comes from your task switching focus to read yourself back into where you were last at, if you're progressing something, and then switching over to something else and reading yourself back into that. So you can progress that. And yes, I get I take your point, Nick, that lots of apps and widgets and things are pinging off and going off and distracting you. But there are ways to sort of optimize. And there are sort of disciplines you can practice, I think, to, to prevent them being too distracting. So I'm forever turning on and off notifications on my phone, or on or on my computer. So if I've got something I really need to concentrate on for an hour, then I'll tell my computer not to tell me about emails that come in. Whereas if I'm in more of a flippant work practice mode, then I'll have all the notifications going off and I'll just sort of deal with them as they come in. So they're, they're, they're, but that's a discipline thing, I have to actively do that to manage it. And I wonder, I mean, we said it feels unproductive doing this task switching. But what I what I'm not sure of is, are we, it may feel unproductive, but are we getting a lot more done because of the technology exists? I know for a fact that the job we kind of do this very research based, very involving looking up lots of information, which just wouldn't be possible if we didn't have the internet and didn't have email and didn't have all these communications, didn't have Google didn't have all these huge online resources, it just wouldn't be possible. If we had to physically go to libraries, we would be going to libraries all over the country to get the information we needed, because it wouldn't be
Speaker C:in one place. And if you if you look at other things, you know, in terms of being able to manage the speed of flow of information, if you know, if you look at things like flying a jet fighter, for example, now, you know, that simply wouldn't have been possible for a human to do without a whole series of technological inputs. And also some of those, you know, the way those tasks are queued to to a person we and we see ourselves, you know, in like, you know, the big example of where people study multitasking is driving because of the safety issue, you know, and can you use your mobile phone and drive at the same time, you know, is it? How is it with hands free and all those kinds of issues? And, you know, I'll come on to the distraction side of that in a minute. But certainly, if you think about navigation, and, you know, satellite navigation, or, you know, Google, telling you where to where to go as you're driving, you know, there's a strong argument to be made that it's a lot better having something telling you turn left here than the driver staring out the window while they're driving, trying to look for signs and things. So, so I think there are there are pros and pros and cons. Sometimes it, you know, it helps you deal with lots of tasks. Sometimes it creates additional tasks that might not be might not be
Speaker B:needed. All I did, I did a one man time and motion study today, using me as the subject. And I made a list of all the things I did today. So we're talking about a roughly a three hour window. And they were basically, I think there is interesting, think of it in terms of there's been basically four kinds of tasks, you've got one, and the relationship that those tasks have with technology, this is helpful for me to break it down this way when I looked at it. So first of all, you have tasks that are definitely unchanged by technology. So that includes kind of doing the washing up and having a bath and putting the heating on and taking the kids to school and shopping for food and then putting that food away when you get home. All of that stuff is pretty much unscathed by technology. Well, maybe in your life. Well, you know, I mean, well, I mean, that very little difference. Yeah, I know. But I don't do that as it happens. So these just for me, then you've got the sort of type two tasks, which are more work, but probably better. So that includes things like recharging my electric toothbrush, which is not something that I would have done, you know, 50 years ago, because they didn't have rechargeable toothbrushes. And, you know, things like having my alarm clock on my phone, which requires a bit of extra work and recharging my e-cigarette. No one had to recharge a cigarette 10, 15 years ago. But they're better. They're better things. Then we have things which are roughly the same amount of work, but definitely better. These are really good things. And I think these are all the things that actually the Internet was really, you know, is at its best. It's things like arranging appointments by email and then calendar management, online conference calls, putting dates in diaries and things like paying an invoice where, you know, you would have had to send a check or go to the bank or something. And that is so much easier. And if you like, that is to do with information sharing. And then finally, the really annoying tasks, the tasks that actually I think I object most to are the ones that are more work for absolutely no more achievements in terms of my life. And so there were two today. This is not, you know, this is not unusual. I feel like there's at least one or two of these every day. So first of all, I got a cancellation of my antivirus contract, which was erroneous. They sent me an email saying they cancelled it because I sent them a query about something totally different. So that's something I then have to, what do I do? I've got to kind of log in. Of course, it's impossible to find out who to contact or, you know, you send an email and it's the wrong email address. And it's one of those tasks which is balloons out of control because you then have to, you know, you've got to kind of manage your approach. It's a very simple thing, which just wouldn't exist. This problem would not exist without the internet. And then the other one was I had to update my payment information for a web service. And there was no, I couldn't, the link they sent didn't work. I couldn't log in through Google using it. And then when I logged in through the normal method, there was no update payment information button. These are actually, these are the things I think which bug me the most. It's this sort of thing where you, these tasks did not exist 10, 15 years ago. And I feel like they still, they occupy quite a disproportionate amount of my life. Well, I mean, and sorry, before you come in, Chris,
Speaker A:I mean, that's interesting. By the way, I suppose you didn't add podcast research in there as well.
Speaker B:Well, that's fun. So you're researching, researching for the podcast. That's that. I don't mean in the last one. I mean, the third group that you said. That is, yeah, that's, that's, that is definitely that, that is classic top right. I mean, it's, sorry. Yeah. In other words, this is sort of same amount of work, less work, much better results being able to see. I love that kind of thing. That's what the internet is made for.
Speaker A:Yeah. What strikes me for what you've been saying there is, and that list probably sounds fairly similar to all of us in our own, our own daily lives. What strikes me is the volume of stuff there. Now, I wonder if we were having this conversation 15 years ago. I wonder if we would struggle to find the same variety and volume of tasks. And I think this, maybe that's what it's about is that you can do all this stuff. And so you do. And it all starts to get a little bit
Speaker C:overwhelming. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the, one of the most difficult things to deal with is simply the sort of rapidity with which things come in. So previously, your correspondences would have turned up in the morning with the mail, you would have sat down and gone through those, if you were a journalist or whatever, and that would have been done and dusted. Whereas now, the things I find most cognitively burdensome are lots of these kind of social group messaging kind of apps that people use like Slack or WhatsApp or whatever they might be, where simply just the frequency of communications coming in is very high. And you could, you can, there's a timeliness about them. So if you want to engage in the conversation, you have to be, you know, respond in a timely fashion. But it's, if you're trying to do something else, as Peter was saying, you know, you can turn off your sort of, you know, your notifications, your notifications. But if you want to be engaged in that, you have to constantly, it's like, effectively, these, you know, these platforms are like being constantly engaged in a whole series of conversations, like being at a dinner party, where everybody is asking you questions and talking about things, and you're trying to be involved in them all. That's where I find it is most, it is most distracting, and multitasking is most difficult.
Speaker A:Okay, so going on from there, Peter?
Speaker D:Something, well, when I've got multiple projects on the go that I'm involved in, big, you know, big groups of work, that's when I find most sort of distracting and most stressful, the highest level of anxiety is if there's lots of things that are calling on my time, rather than one thing I can sort of concentrate on. It doesn't matter, it's not so much how complicated those tasks are, it's just if they are lots of different, very different things that are going in different directions, I find that quite bamboozling at times, whereas having one particular project, I can hold all of it in my head.
Speaker C:And I think that's the thing, it's the, you know, the familiarity of the tasks you're trying to switch between, and your sort of proficiency at those tasks, has a big impact, you know, and research has shown it's got a big impact on your ability to deal with moving between them efficiently. So if it's, you know, if it's two things you're not used to doing, if it's a new skill you're acquiring, then it's, you know, it's much more difficult to switch efficiently between them than if it's something, you know, motor skills all the time, we can walk and talk at the same time and converse, that's not a problem for us, they're both very familiar tasks, but if somebody asks you to start skiing and you've never skied before, and have a conversation, you won't be able to do those things, you know, at the same time.
Speaker A:I think there's an issue here of personality type as well, because I can be a little bit impressionable and quite easily distracted, and so God forbid if sometimes, and it is valid sometimes, I need to do a bit of research on how to do something on YouTube, for example, and I find myself two hours later, you know, looking at my 50th cat video or something.
Speaker B:But anyway, I think that's completely normal, I think we've got this, we've sort of managed to work ourselves into, we still have a kind of work ethic, I think, you know, which pretends that the internet and these distractions don't exist, and that, you know, I think there's an expectation of people responding to their emails quickly, and you know, and that's really unhealthy, I mean, I think it is cognitively unhealthy, it certainly induces stress, but I think, you know, certainly in my case, my creativity is greatly reduced, because it means that, you know, some things just need, as Peter was saying, they need time to upload them into your head, you know, it takes time to read yourself back into a task, and to get all your thoughts where they were when you last left off, so that you can then actually begin to make genuine progress, particularly things like document production, when you're writing or writing something, documents are really complex, you know, things to produce, and they have a complex sort of structure, and you have to know where you were before. Now, if you're in the middle of writing a paragraph, and then an email comes in, and you think, I'm just going to check, it's not something I have to respond to, but you've already lost, you know, that's the thing, because you will get sucked into it, you'll think, oh, that's good, I'll just, you know, I'll just archive that, and then I can
Speaker C:not worry about it. But even if you don't get sucked into it, just taking you out of that moment, you then have, you go from, I've literally read the title of that email, back to your original task, and you have to reassemble your mental model of what it was you were doing then, and that's where the that's where the inefficiencies come in.
Speaker A:So I want to slightly move, I mean, I'm looking to wrap up pretty shortly, but I want to move away from sound like grumpy old men struggling with technology.
Speaker B:Well, I think this is I know, but I think I think this is, we have to talk about solutions. Yeah, but we've got to face this. This is really important. I think I mean, this is affecting everyone in the world now. And I think it's a really big cause of, you know, of stress and reduction in productivity. And, and potentially, you know, I mean, as Peter was saying, you can manage it, but it but it's a real kind of doing that itself is cognitively draining. Yeah, I'd say, you know, you haven't heard from Peter. It's not grumpy old men's actually.
Speaker A:Yeah, you know, this is, this is really important. Absolutely. But that's what I want to talk about. So solutions. So one thing so we talked about, and even the solution itself involves turning stuff off, or I mean, so what's the answer? How do we feel less stress?
Speaker D:So I think, I think a lot of examples I've heard so far, about the, about the distraction element, and the not links in emails not working, this is this sounds to me like a misapplication of the technology, either the information architecture, how it's presented to you is poor, or a missed a unavoidable mistake introduced by a third party. So it's not, it doesn't sound those negative examples don't sound like the technology's fault per se, but how it's being applied. And I mean, I, as I said before, I'm a huge techno optimist, and I think technology is enhanced productivity beyond our wildest dreams. And we just wouldn't be able to achieve what we do today, 50 years ago. And I think that that sort of trend will only increase, but it does rely on good design and good engineering to make to make to make the most of the technologies without them becoming inherently distracting. So we know I got I bought myself a nest thermostat for Christmas. And I can already see its benefits taking hold. I mean, it's a piece of pointless, not pointless piece of unnecessary technology, the thermostat I had was working fine. But I can just the ability of to remotely control that thermostat without having to go downstairs is great. And the promise of the system learning my patterns of behaviour to predict when I want the heating on. So I don't have to manually go and interfere with the thermostat.
Speaker B:Cut, cut. So Peter arriving home tonight and his house is melted.
Speaker C:But I think that's a really good example of where Peter was talking about the intelligent aspect of it and it learning what you want to do, and then taking that task on from you that that is good technology technology that learns from you. So yes, it might create a new job in the first instance, which is to tell it when you want your heating to come on and off and and, you know, interact with it and teach it. But once it's learned from you, you never have to faff around with your thermostat again. So it's actually reducing, you know, reducing tasks.
Speaker B:But I think, see, I think one of the things we've touched on is, and it was interesting to me, just from my thing this morning, that actually, the two examples that created the biggest headache were both things, if you like going wrong, is that I think, and I'm a massive technological optimist as well. I'm in the Peter camp when it comes to sort of, you know, what what promises these holders certainly don't want to, you know, row any of this back. But one thing that I think technology, digital technology does is it is it makes systems much more fragile, by which I mean, if they are not performing close to 100%, their performance tails off very rapidly. So an example might be something like, you know, a book compared to a Kindle. If you lose a page of a book, or you drop it in the bath, or it falls off the table, you've still got pretty much a whole book. It's close to a whole book. If you do any of those things to a Kindle, you know, it doesn't work at all. And, or, you know, you forget your recharger and all these other things. And so, and I think generally, you know, when you have things like you have things like you, well, let's take a thermostat, you become dependent on the algorithm functioning well. And if it does, if it stops working, and it's in control of your heating, you are really in trouble, you know, whereas the analog system of you going and switching it on when you're cold and off when it is, is much more robust. And I think, I think this, this is the problem with sort of, so centralised things, digital things, things where the functioning becomes less and less transparent to us, are going to introduce lots of tasks when they go wrong, which are actually, you know, purely created by that technology. And I think, you know, and I feel like that's actually where that's where a lot of the pain in the ass comes. It's when, well, this link isn't working, it's this payment method isn't working, something else has gone wrong, and there's no way of fixing it, or at least fixing it is a 27 step process.
Speaker C:Yeah, I mean, I think that, that, that issue has always existed before, you know, prior to digital technologies, because you just had other people, and bureaucracies, and they were impossible to fix. And they were totally opaque as well. So, you know, but to me, the key problem with the technologies now is their ubiquity, and your inability to escape them, they've made themselves addictive, right? So you want them all the time, that's been their sort of success. And, you know, I wonder, you know, what Wordsworth would have written if he'd, you know, had a mobile phone and, you know, Google. Probably a lot less if we take your word for it. He would
Speaker B:have had some great selfies, I'm sure. He would have Instagrammed some daffodils. Exactly. He
Speaker C:wouldn't have been able to wander off on his own. And he wouldn't have been lonely. He wouldn't
Speaker A:have been lonely. So we'll wrap up there. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer, and we've been here with Peter Coghill, Chris Wragg, and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. Until next time, bye-bye.
