Multitasking Is Dumb: This Is Why (research Proven)

Multitasking enables you to get multiple tasks done in mediocre fashion. Tolerable speed. Minimal quality. Single-tasking empowers you to maximize your capacity and resources. Ample quality and quantity. Switching costs. Concentration pays.

Multi Or Single

The mind isn’t designed for heavy-duty multitasking—or multitasking at all. Doing more than one task at a time takes a toll on productivity—your short answer. Psychologists liken choreography or air-traffic control operations to multitasking. When you monitor aircrafts and tell pilots what to do not to collide over the walkie-talkie, mental overload can mean destruction.

Trying to perform two or more tasks simultaneously does result in a productivity catastrophe. Sounds cool. Superhuman shit. Two, three, four tasks in rapid succession. Gets our unproductive, results-oriented, always-on society butterflies. Science, sadly, disagrees. Psychology, neurology, cardiology, physiology, any -ology.

Psychological Research Says…

Easy to measure. You just make crowds of people juggle tasks and test their performance. Psychologists do this, comparing how long it takes to get everything done when task-switching. By measuring the cost in time for switching tasks, assessing complexity or familiarity, and careful tracking, psychology becomes elementary math. A piece of cake.

One such study was done by Robert Rogers and colleagues. Findings were not on the multitasker’s side I’m afraid. Even when people had to switch completely predictably between two tasks, they were slower. Increasing the time between trials for preparation didn’t eliminate the cost, but slightly lowered it. Prediction and preparation barely help. Not promising.

Battle Your Brains

Basically adjusting your mental and cognitive between tasks is a competition. A tug of war. A push and pull, where you dedicate resources—brainpower—to one, pull them from the other, and play this game against yourself. Ever check emails, talk on the phone, or respond to messages while driving? Notice the subtle pause? There’s your cost.

Renata Meuter reported another, experimenting with habitual tasks. If people had to name digits in their first or second language, one may expect they’d be faster in their first. They were, indeed, slower in their first language because of the change. You aren’t doing multiple things simultaneously. You are switching around. Switching takes refocusing. Remembering where you were takes brainpower. Both handicaps to you.

Compounding Downsides

According to research, human executive processes have two distinct, complementary stages. One is the “goal shifting”, wanting to do this instead of that. The other is “rule activation”, turning off the rules for that and turning on the rules for this. Both help people switch between tasks without awareness. Both have costs. Small costs which add up.

The same researchers said, “even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40 percent of someone’s productive time.” 40 percent is no joke. Multitasking is attractive and seems efficient on the surface but takes more time and prompts more errors. Laundry while on the phone with a friend is OK. Losing a second as a driver on their phone can be life-or-death for someone on the street.

Ask Biology For Updates

Interestingly, the multitasker even inflates their perceived ability—with their actual ability to multitask, of course, staying unchanged. Human minds and brains simply lack the architecture to perform two or more tasks in unison. No neural building blocks. Lacking brains, lagging life’s domains!

In layman’s terms, our attention and executive control circuitry is not built or capable of multitasking. The human evolved to single-task. Each switch places great demands on your control and attention networks, which are limited in their capacities. The brain knows your goal, scans for information related to the goal, discards the irrelevant and competing shit to help you focus, and so on. Each and every switch.

Brain Selfies Agree

In one functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)—a device for taking pictures of brains—study, subjects had to classify colors, shapes, and patterns. They threw their subjects into the claustrophobic chambers and made them suffer. Switch and stay trials were performed. Multitasking and single-tasking.

To nobody’s surprise, and consistent with the view that multitasking creates heightened cognitive demands, their brains lit up. Meaning when we switch from one task to another, more neural processing goes down because we have to bring our mind and attention back to the new task. No benefits. No efficiency. No automaticity.

Don’t Be Fooled

You get it. Psychological science and neuroscience repeatedly echo that our minds are taxed by multitasking. Productivity plummets. Multitasking is not free. Computers can multitask and keep their resources in check, making for faster processing and execution. Humans cannot. Before Elon Musk upgrades our mushy neuron clusters into microprocessors with infinite capabilities…

What many consider an essential skill for the workplace is fucking catastrophic for productivity. You cannot get better at it by putting in constant practice. You cannot improve at taking several customer orders, working on a presentation while answering emails, and cooking spaghetti Bolognese while talking on the phone. You do not have the brain regions to do so!

Multitasking Side Effects

Combining everyday, low-impact activities is fine. Doing several high-impact, high-stakes tasks simultaneously is not. No, it will not shorten the time to complete a project. No, it won’t save you money. No, it will not increase productivity. No, you cannot learn to multitask. No, no, no…!

I promise multitasking will achieve a few awesome outcomes for you. More stress, low-quality results, and procrastination. Less crossed off of the to-do list, inability to handle distractions, longer time to complete projects, and an inefficient use of your brain. Hooray, y’all! Enjoy your task-switching hodgepodge and lowered productivity.

The Bottom Line

Short answer: multitasking is bullshit. Long answer: above, plus the physical and mental stress, memory and learning impairment, and safety concerns. Leave it. Single-task instead. Don’t divide your most precious resources—your attention and time. Concentrate and get things done. Single-tasking pays dividends. Multitasking costs and indebts.

In the end, I cannot push you to neither pole. The research clearly outlines the upsides of single-tasking and the downsides of multitasking. Do what you deem best. “Lost time,” said Benjamin Franklin, “is never found again.”