Today I read this and I thought I would share it with members of the
list that may not get the TIMES.
From now on I have sworn off driving and talking on my mobile phone.
For real.
Kirby
March 25, 2007
Slow Down, Multitaskers, and Don’t Read in Traffic
By STEVE LOHR
Confident multitaskers of the world, could I have your attention?
Think you can juggle phone calls, e-mail, instant messages and
computer work to get more done in a time-starved world? Read on,
preferably shutting out the cacophony of digital devices for a while.
Several research reports, both recently published and not yet
published, provide evidence of the limits of multitasking. The
findings, according to neuroscientists, psychologists and management
professors, suggest that many people would be wise to curb their
multitasking behavior when working in an office, studying or driving
a car.
These experts have some basic advice. Check e-mail messages once an
hour, at most. Listening to soothing background music while studying
may improve concentration. But other distractions — most songs with
lyrics, instant messaging, television shows — hamper performance.
Driving while talking on a cellphone, even with a hands-free headset,
is a bad idea.
In short, the answer appears to lie in managing the technology,
instead of merely yielding to its incessant tug.
“Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of
mistakes,” said David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of
the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of
Michigan. “Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the
standpoint of our ability to process information.”
The human brain, with its hundred billion neurons and hundreds of
trillions of synaptic connections, is a cognitive powerhouse in many
ways. “But a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two
things at once,” said René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of
the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University.
Mr. Marois and three other Vanderbilt researchers reported in an
article last December in the journal Neuron that they used magnetic
resonance imaging to pinpoint the bottleneck in the brain and to
measure how much efficiency is lost when trying to handle two tasks
at once.
Study participants were given two tasks and were asked to respond to
sounds and images. The first was to press the correct key on a
computer keyboard after hearing one of eight sounds. The other task
was to speak the correct vowel after seeing one of eight images.
The researchers said that they did not see a delay if the
participants were given the tasks one at a time. But the researchers
found that response to the second task was delayed by up to a second
when the study participants were given the two tasks at about the
same time.
In many daily tasks, of course, a lost second is unimportant. But one
implication of the Vanderbilt research, Mr. Marois said, is that
talking on a cellphone while driving a car is dangerous. A one-second
delay in response time at 60 miles an hour could be fatal, he noted.
“We are under the impression that we have this brain that can do more
than it often can,” observed Mr. Marois, who said he turns off his
cellphone when driving.
The young, according to conventional wisdom, are the most adept
multitaskers. Just look at teenagers and young workers in their 20s,
e-mailing, instant messaging and listening to iPods at once.
Recently completed research at the Institute for the Future of the
Mind at Oxford University suggests the popular perception is open to
question. A group of 18- to 21-year-olds and a group of 35- to 39-
year-olds were given 90 seconds to translate images into numbers,
using a simple code.
The younger group did 10 percent better when not interrupted. But
when both groups were interrupted by a phone call, a cellphone short-
text message or an instant message, the older group matched the
younger group in speed and accuracy.
“The older people think more slowly, but they have a faster fluid
intelligence, so they are better able to block out interruptions and
choose what to focus on,” said Martin Westwell, deputy director of
the institute.
Mr. Westwell is 36, and thus, should be better able to cope with
interruptions. But he has modified his work habits since completing
the research project last month.
“I check my e-mail much less often,” he said. “The interruptions
really can throw you off-track.”
In a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15
minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or
computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant
messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news,
sports or entertainment Web sites.
“I was surprised by how easily people were distracted and how long it
took them to get back to the task,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft
research scientist and co-author, with Shamsi Iqbal of the University
of Illinois, of a paper on the study that will be presented next month.
“If it’s this bad at Microsoft,” Mr. Horvitz added, “it has to be bad
at other companies, too.”
In the computer age, technology has been seen not only as a factor
contributing to information overload but also as a tool for coping
with it. Computers can help people juggle workloads, according a
paper presented this month at a conference at the National Bureau of
Economic Research. The researchers scrutinized the work at an unnamed
executive recruiting firm, including projects and 125,000 e-mail
messages. They also examined the firm revenues, people’s compensation
and the use of information technology by the recruiters.
The recruiters who were the heaviest users of e-mail and the firm’s
specialized database were the most productive in completing projects.
“You can use the technology to supplement your brain and keep track
of more things,” said Erik Brynjolfsson of the Sloan School of
Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-
author of the paper, along with Sinan Aral of the Stern School of
Business at New York University, and Marshall Van Alstyne of Boston
University.
But the paper also found that “beyond an optimum, more multitasking
is associated with declining project completion rates and revenue
generation.”
For the executive recruiters, the optimum workload was four to six
projects, taking two to five months each.
The productivity lost by overtaxed multitaskers cannot be measured
precisely, but it is probably a lot. Jonathan B. Spira, chief analyst
at Basex, a business-research firm, estimates the cost of
interruptions to the American economy at nearly $650 billion a year.
That total is an update of research published 18 months ago, based on
surveys and interviews with professionals and office workers, which
concluded that 28 percent of their time was spent on what they deemed
interruptions and recovery time before they returned to their main
tasks.
Mr. Spira concedes that the $650 billion figure is a rough estimate —
an attempt to attach a number to a big problem. Work interruptions
will never — and should not — be eliminated, he said, since they are
often how work is done and ideas are shared. After all, one person’s
interruption is another’s collaboration.
The information age is really only a decade or two old in the sense
of most people working and communicating on digital devices all day,
Mr. Spira said. In the industrial era, it took roughly a century
until Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1911 published his principles of
“scientific management” for increasing worker productivity.
“We don’t have any equivalent yet for the knowledge economy,” Mr.
Spira said.
But university and corporate researchers say they can help. Brain
scans, social networking algorithms and other new tools should help
provide a deeper understanding of the limits and the potential of the
human brain, they said. That will teach workers in groups how to
manage the overload of digital communications efficiently.
A new organization, the Institute for Innovation and Information
Productivity, whose sponsors include Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and
Johnson & Johnson, has been created to sponsor such research. It
provided money for the recent research project at Oxford’s Institute
for the Future of the Mind, for example.
Further research could help create clever technology, like sensors or
smart software that workers could instruct with their preferences and
priorities to serve as a high-tech “time nanny” to ease the modern
multitasker’s plight.
That is what Mr. Horvitz of Microsoft is working on. “We live in this
Wild West of digital communications now,” he said. “But I think
there’s a lot of hope for the future.”
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