the costs of "multi-tasking": why task-switching is expensive

earlier this week, i was explaining why multi-tasking is no good to a new client and thought i’d share. i think i’ll just share rapid-fire bullet point style:

• multi-tasking isn’t real. as explained beautifully over here, the brain can only handle one cognitive function at a time. the only exception to this is that you can do one cognitive task while doing a physical task that you’re very familiar with (like walking or sketching or knitting).
• when people think they’re multi-tasking, they’re often just missing information. sometime soon, i think i’m going to count the number of times someone is texting while i’m talking to them and they ask me “what?” after i’m done talking to them. i would estimate three people do this to me daily.
• missing information is costly. this point speaks for itself. however, a less obvious cost to missing information while multi-tasking is the time and energy it takes to go find the information again OR the time it takes to fix a mistake that impacted someone else.
• task switching, which is what multi-tasking actually is, undermines productivity. this is contrary to how many of us are being (culturally) trained. we live in a society where doing more is seen as better, regardless of whether or not you have capacity for what you’re doing. it’s a vicious cycle whereby being overworked or frenzied creates a situation in which the frenzied stated of being is the only way to make ends meet (speaking economically and socially). some of this is an economic failure, but some of it is just cultural. but i digress… multi-tasking doesn’t actually help you do more things well, it allows you to do many things in a mediocre way. by preventing focus, multi-tasking undermines depth in production (and maker time is SO important to producing good work). additionally, as weinshenck mentions in her article, multi-tasking requires energy from your pre-frontal cortex. your pre-frontal cortex is critical to being productive. so when you occupy your pre-frontal cortex, you diminish your own ability to be creative.
• context switching is incredibly expensive. i learned via the trello blog (which is a pretty amazing productivity resource whether or not you use trello) the most detrimental type of task-switching is context-switching. this is when you’re doing one type of work and then you quickly switch to a different type of work. this undermines flow is the one and creates a slow on-ramp to flow in the other.
  
  for example, you’re working on a complicated excel spreadsheet. you’ve got lots of information in your head about what goes where and how you need to make equations to get the numbers you need. then, an email pops up and you go to your inbox to respond to it. this is the most expensive type of switch. to use the analogy of a computer, your RAM (short-term memory) was filled with information needed to finish that spreadsheet. without that information floating around in your short-term memory, you actually can’t get to the answer you need. when you switched to your email, your brain dumped all that stuff from your RAM and started filling it up with email information: who is this email from? what’s the context that this email is about? how do i need to respond in a politically appropriate way? etc. when you return to the spreadsheet, you have re-up all the information you had dumped before to finish the task. the time it takes to reacquaint yourself likely would have been saved if you had just finished the spreadsheet and then gone to deal with the email later.
• we’re actually bad at re-focusing. i read a while ago that it takes most people 25 minutes to return to a task at work after being interrupted. a different one (that i can’t find right now) said it takes most people 12-15 minutes to get back into flow once knocked out of it.

wow. there’s actually a lot more to this, but i’m out of time. part 2 coming some day!

ps - this post has a lot to do with cognitive budgeting. i probably should wrap all those posts into a series or something…

meditation is like muddy water settling

another insight that has stuck with me from the mary karr episode of on being is from the following paragraph (so glad the on being podcast episodes have full transcripts):

DR. KARR: Yeah. I love that. I mean, I love that thing Thomas Keating says about practicing mindfulness, and that it’s sort of like — there’s a bunch of water that has mud and silt in it, and the longer you practice, the more that just kind of settles to the bottom, and you don’t feel any peace. You might practice for days and weeks, and it’s just cloudy and noisy. And he says what you don’t realize is that healing is happening, that that stuff — by doing that, you are settling it, but you don’t notice it because it hasn’t settled yet. You have to just — how difficult just to keep sitting there.

this has been exactly how meditation has benefitted me over the last couple of years. i started trying to meditate daily in jan 2015. i hit 250/365 days that year and, as far as i can remember, i’ve meditated 10+ minutes every day this year.

at first, i didn’t really notice anything. it didn’t seem like much was changing about anything i could sense or feel.

then, during the summer, i started meditating before i went to work. i noticed a significant difference in my ability to assess situations more thoughtfully. i could just see into a situation with more perspective.

that fall, when i got a new job, i began to notice that i could notice when i wasn’t focused. i would be focusing on a particular work task and then i would feel myself reaching for something unrelated. like… i could sense my brain wander away from what i was doing. or, to be more explicit, i noticed when thoughts crept in that weren’t related to what i was working on.

that proved to be unbelievably valuable because i could then either (a) find a way to deal with the distraction (which often just involved writing it down to do later) or (b) put it aside and refocus. either way, both of those options were better than what i would do previously, which was let the thought actually distract me and then snap out of it (texting, facebook, email, twitter, reading random articles) 30+ minutes later and wonder ‘wtf have i been doing?!?’

these two last things i’ve gained from daily meditation are probably the most impactful.

1. by noticing which thoughts wander into my brain during meditation (i.e. what’s on my mind), i’m able to better parse out what is taking up my mental energy. that allows me to, outside of meditation, handle those things that would have taken up lots of mental energy over the day. i’m then freer to focus on other things with more calm and clarity. the positive impact of this cannot be understated.
2. learning to let my thoughts come and go with the trust that the important things will come back when they need to. sometimes during the day i’ll remember something that seems so important but i won’t have time to process it properly. then, i would beat myself up and try so hard to think of the thing i had forgotten.
   
   it turns out, as i’ve meditated more and more, i’ve noticed that my brain is actually quite adept at not letting me forget really important things. the really important things always come back up (often during meditation, but not always). i’m able to process the thought then if i missed it the first time. and if a thought doesn’t come back up, it honestly probably wasn’t that important. now, i know that’s a very common trope that’s often seen as trite, but i’ve really begun to trust it lately and it’s brought a lot more ease to my thinking.

so yea. it really feels like the process of muddy water settling. you don’t necessarily notice it day-to-day, but over time, the ability to see through the increasingly clear water provides huge benefits. you just have to let it settle enough to get there.

the diversity/bandwidth tradeoff

in the book, resilience, in the paragraph immediately preceding the one i wrote about yesterday, the authors describe something called the diversity/bandwidth tradeoff:

“As we expand the diversity of social connections we have, the bandwidth we can commit to each of those connections becomes more limited, and the information that comes from them gets weaker and narrower. And that in turns makes weak ties suitable for certain kinds of work and strong ties suitable for others.”

i think about this all time. the two most common contexts for me are productivity and social connections, but it comes up in other places, too.

on the productivity front, it shows up as needing to make tough choices about priorities (the last part of the quote above about weak ties vs strong ties isn’t really relevant for the productivity front, but it is for the social). it means recognizing that you can’t do everything. and you can really only do a few things at the same time if you want to do any of them well.

on one hand, that reality has to do with amassing resources. building knowledge (and sometimes a network, too) relevant to what it is you’re trying to do requires focus. whether its raising a family or becoming an opera star, the more you can focus, the faster and more deeply you’ll learn.

on the other hand, it has to do with creativity. in order to be creative, our brains actually need to have some open space (as simon martin mentions over on the ceros blog in his recent post on the art and science of generating great ideas). when focusing on too many different things, your brain doesn’t have space to make connections because it’s too busy trying to hold information. and as david allen, one of my productivity gurus says, “the brain is a great place for having ideas, not holding them.” you can’t generate new ideas in your lanes of focus if your brain is too busy holding ones you’ve already had.

the diversity/bandwidth tradeoff shows up in a parallel way socially to the productivity breakdown.

for example, when i was in grad school, i really tried to do everything. this resulted in me running myself ragged. what i’ve been learning this year is that it’s super important (and very counter-cultural) to have a clearly delineated group of close friends and focus on those friendships intensely. yes, this means that being close to everyone is not possible, but it allows three things. (1) it allows us to build the type of deep friendship that we all crave (the “i would drop whatever i’m doing if you needed me” type of friendship). (2) it allows spontaneity in those friendships because you aren’t overcommitted. (3) when do you do hangout with someone outside of your inner circle, it means you can show up fully for that person because you’re not exhausted from giving too much to too many different people.

of course, there is always a balance. it’s not good to only be thinking about just one thing or have just one friend. but most people (myself included) try to do way too much and it undermines their success.

sidenote: on this friend front, i think there may be a lot more to this that belongs in another post… for example:

• maybe this theory is why having a small number of close friends and many distant ones is good.
• i wonder if people and communities would be better if we thought strategically about this from an early age? what if we taught our children that their lives would be the most fulfilling if their thought about their friendships like this? what if the design of our physical communities supported and encouraged friendships like this? hm!

the four characteristics of the best teams

this resilience book is pretty dope. the chapter that i’m in now is about resilience groups and teams. after lots of different cases and data, they make this claim about teams (page 187):

“The most powerful constellation seems to be to have small, diverse teams of strongly tied collaborators, who each have a large and diverse weak-tie network — the best of both worlds.”

they break it down in the chapter differently, but here are the parts of that that seem critical to me:

small

the team needs to be small enough to not have to coordinate too many pieces. in the last few years of my career, i’ve seen this play out as logisitical coordination RE calendars and locations to meet, but it can show up in other ways, too.

diverse

actual and cognitive diversity are really important. they give a team the ability to think deep and wide and make breakthroughs in ways that teams that are too similar can’t.

strongly-tied

the team members need to be strongly tied. this means that, even though they should have different cognitive abilities, they should be similar enough to work well together. there’s nothing worse than having a dysfunctional team. in fact, i often tell my friends that if their relationship with their boss isn’t a good one, the awesomeness of the work their doing isn’t worth staying. it’s a pattern i’ve seen over and over. but i digress…

with many weak-ties

each team member should have a large and diverse network (i.e. many weak ties). this allows the core team to have access to knowledge resources without needing to have them all in house.

the more i think about it, the more i think these four points are how to make the world a more beautiful, functional place, while also shifting some of the terror that is the large corporation. maybe this thinking could/should play out in how we structure our social lives and physical communities as well. hm!

cognitive diversity, actual diversity, and the benefits of both

pages 204-208 in resilience have two really fascinating cases that make two astounding points:

cognitive diversity on a team can compensate for and even create better outcomes than intelligence on a team, and actual diversity and cognitive diversity together can be mutually reinforcing and beneficial. so what does all that mean? i’ll explain.

cognitive diversity

scott page is a professor of complex systems, political science, and economics and the university of michigan. he defines cognitive diversity as such: the distribution of different kinds of thinkers within a group.

kevin dunbar, a psychologist at the university of toronto, studied cognitive diversity and its impacts on team performance. turns out that having a team with a high (but not too high) level of cognitive diversity can create higher levels of performance.

dunbar took two scientific research labs and studied them in their actual research environments. team x had a high level of overall intelligence but a relatively narrow range of scientists. team y had a much more diverse set of scientists (i’m not sure how the intelligence level compared). the labs have no connection to each other.

at one point, teams x and y ran into a similar problem. team y, the cognitively diverse team, solved the problem in two minutes at a single meeting. team x was still struggling with the problem two months later. i can only imagine how much time and progress team x wasted trying to solve a problem that team y solved in minutes.

dunbar’s theory is that having different ways to think about a problem allows more access to alternative thinking about potential solutions. when people in a group think similarly, for example, they tend to use similar and more complex metaphors to describe situations because they have shared understanding of the knowledge required to make sense of them. teams with different thinking and backgrounds tend to use more basic but wide ranging types of metaphors in order to spam knowledge gaps between members. this allows more diverse ways of thinking about the same problem which seems to lead to solution faster.

now all of this said, there are certainly tradeoffs to having more diverse teams over similar teams. as with everything, there’s a balance.

teams with low cognitive diversity have low startup costs because they share language and knowledge. the means they can probably move faster when things are going well.

teams with high cognitive diversity have high communications cost. they can’t easily explain their thinking to others without shared backgrounds so they spend extra time doing so. however, the benefit that that creates is ability to blast through problems quickly, as opposed to getting bottle-necked by a lack of ability to think outside the box.

actual diversity

in a similar way, “actual” diversity (gender, class, race, etc.) also has benefits. the example used in the book was about gender.

when men find lab surprising lab results, they tend to assume they know why and keep moving forward (in my opinion, this is an effect of socialization, not physiology). either way, this pattern has the effect of sending teams down wrong pathways. incorrect early assumptions lead to wasted time down the road and makes it difficult to backtrack to find mistakes.

women, however, tend to try to stop and explain surprising results by doing more rigorous testing. by looking for ways to recreate the results, they generate more firm data and thus a higher ability to explain results.

now, from the outside, this may look like women are slower or less aggressive researchers. however, in reality, women are just as aggressive about their research; they just go about the work in completely different ways.

holy shit, that took 30 minutes to write. :O