More Evidence That Multitasking Reduces Productivity 133
bdking writes "A recent study by a Louisiana State University psychology professor adds more evidence to the argument that the human brain is incapable of performing numerous tasks without memory and productivity loss. 'In four separate experiments, both local second-graders and LSU psychology students were shown words on a computer screen and instructed to remember them in the correct sequence. As the participants read the words, they also sometimes heard unrelated words in the headphones all were wearing. Adults in the LSU study showed a word recall performance drop of 10% on average, while the second-graders’ performance diminished by up to 30% on average.'"
High cost of open plan (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at the high cost of loud open plan cube farms... imagine being able to lower your salary costs by 10% to 30% by productivity increases, merely by providing a more humane working environment.
Isn't it odd that you never hear people complaining, "I'm trying to concentrate here, so make a bunch of noise, OK?"
Re:Here's the thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the thing: would you like to do things once and finish them, or keep fixing the mistakes you've made while being distracted?
Coooperative or Preemptive Multitasking? (Score:5, Insightful)
I find I'm very productive when I focus on short tasks and switch between them (sort of like how co-routines work).
I'm not productive when I'm doing more than one thing at a time.
I hope the experiment doesn't match the summary (Score:5, Insightful)
How is this multi-tasking? (Score:4, Insightful)
Invalid test (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's try this. You have four tasks. Each task has some dead time involved as you're waiting for something to happen. Subject 1 does each task sequentially. Subject 2 interleaves the tasks, doing work on the next task during the dead time in the previous task. Who finishes first?
Multitasking reduces the time you are waiting for a task to complete, and in many environments, despite the acknowledged penalty due to context switching, you'll come out ahead.
It seems like all they proved is that distraction is not good. (Well done, Captain Obvious.) That's not testing effectiveness of multitasking.
There are typically two types of people (Score:4, Insightful)
If you can listen to music and code at the same time, then you tend to do better in an open plan cube farm, but due to continuous partial attention, perhaps not so well as if you had some place quiet to cogitate.
If you can't listen to music because that's the part of your brain that also processes code, you tend to be at a disadvantage because there's no refuge in wearing headphones. I do OK in an open plan environment, but I do better in an office, since when I get into a deep problem, I tend to react to expected distraction. On the plus side, I can generally go fairly deeper than someone who is listening to music, or at least that's my personal anecdotal experience.
Generally speaking, in open plan cube farm companies, you can typically find a small conference room, or you can find a quiet corner of a lab, or you can grab a phone room, or you can work from home (which they tend to tolerate better than office-based companies) in these situations, so it's not impossible to make progress on deep problems.
Mod parent up. (Score:5, Insightful)
The trick to "multi-tasking" is to break the various tasks down into sub-tasks that can be completed in the time between interruptions.
The human brain is NOT good at focusing on two or more conscious tasks.
Re:Here's the thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
The silly thing is that we actually know quite a lot about task organization for efficient multitasking. It is a key component of task scheduling on any computer. Fine grained multitasking -- especially on a CPU that has a large latency component for switching tasks, is known as "thrashing", and is also known to degrade performance substantially, and whacking a computer with a steady stream of pointless interrupts so that it is always thrashing slows it down.
At the same time, executing tasks with the right granularity and with the right kinds of latency and parallelism can speed things up quite a lot compared to doing tasks one at a time. This, too, is true in life as much as it is in computers. Anybody who cooks knows that you cannot generally make a good meal in serial fashion. If you want to serve rice with a stir fry and end up with dessert in a timely manner, you have to be cooking the rice, chilling the dessert, and chopping up and frying the main course all "at the same time", with layered overlaps in the attention you pay to the different tasks. The tasks are all related and a skilled cook can juggle quite a few of them without cognitive or operational overload and finish a meal far faster than anyone would ever finish it cooking one thing at a time (to a soggy, cold, unproductive finish).
Most normal humans multitask all the time. I listen to music and work while wiggling my feet to maintain circulation. I hop from answering email to posting silly things like this reply to doing work on task A to doing work on task B to doing work on task C -- so much the more so when my tasks are all different, all use the computer (or a number of computers) and take different amounts of time (attended or unattended) to move on to the next stage of completion. Yes, I can be overloaded, I can thrash in my normal work if overloaded so little gets done, but that is entirely different from asking if I can work when somebody is randomly blasting uncorrelated and meaningless distractions into my workspace.
rgb
Re:Here's the thing. (Score:4, Insightful)
In the corporate world: Just Ship It and send the invoice!
Consistent observation from my experience: There is always time to fix something when things go wrong, but never enough time to do things properly from the beginning.
The real problem is one of definition (Score:4, Insightful)
What is multi-tasking. Doing several tasks, each individual task segmented into short activities, combined together to a larger activity for several hours OR trying to pat your head and rub your stomach while performing open heart surgery, piloting a jet in combat and making love... okay, this is slashdot... jerking off.
Women often claim they multi-task better then men but this is usually the first type. Putting the laundry in, making a shopping list, dropping the kids off, go to work, run an errand, make a call, do the shopping, put laundry in dryer, prepare the long cooking part of dinner, pick kids up, listen to their stories, finish cooking etc etc.
This is multi-tasking, computer style. A computer (single CPU at least) does NOT do multipletasks... AT THE SAME TIME. Rather it switches between them and being a computer, it does this really fast. For humans, the switching can only be done so fast but sometimes it is necessary.
But it has been shown beyond a doubt that doing two tasks at the same time is something we are very bad at. All humans. Driving and doing ANYTHING else at the same time, massively increases the chance of an accident. Yes you to, wonder driver.
This test was not about doing several tasks that people had to switch between, but doing several things at once.
Useful multi-tasking still allows you to concentrate on each individual task fully OR trade-off accuracy (listening to kids while doing housework, watching TV while going, "your right" to the wive... okay... your mom. But as any husband knows, this is highly dangerous because you might miss something essential. And then their is hell to pay.
I can read a document and talk on the phone at the same time but I also find I make far more reading mistakes, missing entire lines or reading a word completely wrong causing me to mis-interpret the text.
MindlessAutomata (on-topic nick if ever there was one) makes however one mistake. The human brain isn't massively parallel, our entire body is. You! do not exist. Rather there is a collection of individual cells, tiny lifeforms many of which don't have any of "your" DNA (bacteria) which have formed a "colony" not unlike a coral where multiple animals work together to survive and reproduce. Your gut for instance can be severed from your brain and continue to function. Few other parts can do that as paraplegics demonstrate by being unable to move below the waste but still have their gut work just fine.
You don't even have think about most massive processing your brain does. You can "think" about what you are seeing without even knowing or controlling HOW you see. How all that light is processed into a picture. We don't even think about, for the longest time we didn't even understand. Or language. How come you understand these strange symbols?
But this again, is not multi-tasking. It is closer to a computer having seperate processors for discrete tasks.
Truly doing several things at once, is hard.
Just pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time. And no, it doesn't count if you learned yourself how to do that. Then you are just doing ONE thing that just involves two hands. That is easy, any mechanic can do that. The trick about the patting and rubbing is doing two things you normally never do together, at once. And then your massive brain has serious problems.