466: The Myth of Multitasking
Brought to you by: Pet Sitters Associates. Use ‘Confessional’ at checkout
Do you consider yourself a multitasker? Contrary to popular belief, multitasking does not make us more productive. In fact, what we are capable of doing is not even considered true multitasking. Task switching, as it is known, is the process where our brain switches from one thing to another in rapid succession. While it may feel like we are getting more done, there are several drawbacks to this method of working. We walk through common misconceptions and the modern research on what multitasking actually does to us. We give several tactics you can use to break the habit of attempting to multitask to keep you productive and focused on the things that really matter.
Main topics:
What is multitasking?
What is task switching?
Common misconceptions
Current research
What do we do about it?
Main takeaway: Focusing on a single task saves time, improves accuracy, and reduces stress.
Links:
https://www.petsitterconfessional.com/episodes/402
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-myth-of-multitasking
https://www.npr.org/2013/05/10/182861382/the-myth-of-multitasking
https://neuroleadership.com/your-brain-at-work/the-myth-of-multitasking
ProTrainings: For 10% off any of their courses, use CPR-petsitterconfessional
Give us a call! (636) 364-8260
Follow us on: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter
Subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, & TuneIn
Email us at: feedback@petsitterconfessional.com
A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
tasks, multitasking, focus, brain, visit, multitask, day, pet, leads, pet sitters, task switching, minutes, walk, talk, reduces, client, multitaskers, emails, blocking, important
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin Funkhouser
Meghan 00:00
Oh hello, welcome to pet sitter confessional. I'm Meghan. I'm Collin. Thank you pet sitters associates for sponsoring today's episode and our Patreon supporters who give a little bit of their money every month to help keep the podcast going that they found value in the podcast we thank you so much Yvonne, Anna, Liz Deseret potty wagon Julie, Jan, Laurie, and Lizzie, thank you, thank you, thank you. If you were like us, you have a lot on your to do list. So what we are always constantly finding new things to get done more things to add to our to do list. And you may even be tempted to try multiple things. At the same time. If you listen to last week's episode 464, I had said that I love to multitask in that watch TV and do my admin admin work at the same time. But that's not always possible or really efficient. So today we are going to talk about why multitasking is indeed a myth. And
Collin Funkhouser 00:55
it's not always things like administrative duties, maybe it's you're on a walk the client, you're focusing on their behavior around an oncoming runner that's coming towards you. Then while that's going on, you you remember that you forgot about an email that you had to respond to earlier in the day. So you start working on what you're going to say to that potential client when you get back to your car. This is multitasking, multitasking is described as the ability or really the thought of ability to perform more than one task or activity simultaneously. And this concept would didn't even really arise until the advent of computers because these were devices that in high end cases can truly do two computations at the exact same time the
Meghan 01:39
difference between us and them is we are not robots.
Collin Funkhouser 01:42
Right? Well, and even the definition of multitasking is misleading, because what many consider to be multitasking is actually task switching or I like this other term called Serial tasking. And this distinction is crucial for understanding why the whole concept of multitasking, especially around being productive and running a business is largely considered a myth.
Meghan 02:05
So do not be like me and watch TV and do admin work at the same time. If you hear nothing else from this episode, know this that focusing on a single task, it saves time, it improves accuracy, and it reduces stress, it really does do not be like me. So what exactly is the difference between task switching and multitasking because they sound very similar. But task switching is the process involved in shifting attention from one task to another in rapid succession. So if I am doing admin work and watching TV at the same time, and something really crazy happens on the show like an explosion or something, my mind is ultimately going to go to that thing. And then I have to go back to my admin work and then Oh, another explosion happens I have to go back to the TV and the back of my admin work, it may give the illusion of doing tasks simultaneously. But your brain is actually stopping one task and starting another it is super inefficient. This constant switching can really lead to decreased efficiency and increased errors.
Collin Funkhouser 02:59
Contrast this with what true multitasking is this involves engaging in multiple tasks genuinely at the exact same time. And we can do this I will say with one caveat, we can do this to some extent. So the one example that I hear a lot of times when say people say oh people can multitask is walking and talking. But here's the difference. These kinds of tasks when we are multitasking often involve one task that is automatic or requires minimal cognitive effort paired with another that demands a little bit more focused. So in one aspect, we could say, well, we're constantly multitasking because my heart is beating and my eyes are blinking and my lungs are breathing. But I'm also reading Twitter, or I'm also writing this I'm also walking a dog. But those automatic things, those low cognitive load tasks are not part of this equation.
Meghan 03:49
Both the task switching and true multitasking have a lot of common misconceptions like increased productivity. One of the biggest myths about multitasking is that it actually makes people more productive because you're able to do more tasks in less time or so we think. But research suggests the exact opposite that multitasking actually leads to a significant drop in productivity. Another misconception is the efficiency here that juggling multiple tasks is an efficient way to work, because again, you're able to get them done in less time. But task switching can result in a switch cost, which can slow down the progress and reduce the work quality. So when I watch TV, while I'm doing admin work, keep going back to that example of the explosions that happen or the exciting things that happened in the show. There's a switch cost there in that I'm taking more time away from the admin work, and it's costing me more time because I'm so engrossed in the TV show well, and
Collin Funkhouser 04:40
your brain has to switch modes, your brain has to go from the thing that you're focusing on to then re understand the context of the other tasks that you're trying to do. Get involved in that get caught up to speed, do that task and then dump all of that information and then switch back to the other task. Think of the one that we've heard about for years at this point since the advent of cell phones. You know, I'll just grab this text real quick while I'm driving on my way to the next client. That way, I'm not wasting time. But we all know that distracted driving is one of the biggest incidents of car wrecks in the United States and around the world. And that's why a lot of laws have been written to combat that, because we cannot do both of those at the same time and do them well,
Meghan 05:21
because ultimately, our brain has a capacity, there's a misconception that some people are just naturally better multitaskers because of their better brain capacity. But that's not true. While some people vary in their task switching efficiency, no one is immune to the downsides of multitasking. At the end of the day, we're all human. And we can only take on so much. Our brains are not wired to handle multiple tasks that require conscious thought simultaneously. It's easy to walk and talk because walking is a very low risk thing to do. But filing taxes and cooking dinner cannot be done at the same time, because of the brain capacity needed for both tasks. We've never
Collin Funkhouser 05:59
in our history, been responsible for juggling so many points of data as we have to right now, we have to especially when you're running a business, you've got to keep top of mind, things like when those taxes are due, when the what the client just asked you to do what the home state of repairs are to do vacuum this morning, have you eaten yet, all of these things are number one priority in our brain. And we try and do all of them at the same time. And when we attempt to perform several cognitive tasks at once again, cognitive tasks means I have to provide effort and energy into getting this done. We're not actually multitasking, but we're quickly switching between tasks, which overloads our brains processing capacity, it has some pretty detrimental results. There's been a ton of research on this topic, especially because in the 80s and early 90s, there was a big effort by many corporations and research scientists, because they thought that we could actually be better at multitasking that we could train our brains to do this. And it was the big buzzword of of corporations in the 90s. And even into the early 2000s of hey, we're multitaskers here, we multitask all the time, here's some exercises that you can do to be better at multitasking. But what all of this has led to is just a dearth of research that shows that says don't do this. And it's for a lot of different reasons. And the first one we want to cover is multitasking leads to increased error rates, and decreased efficiency. It really shows that when we attempt to multitask, or more accurately, again, we talked about this is tasks which rapidly, both the speed and accuracy of our work suffer. This is due to the cognitive load that comes with task switching, the brain just needs time to physically adjust to the new task, it has to retrieve that relevant information and apply appropriate rules and concepts and context to what we're actually working on. And this whole thing slows us down. It really does have a slowdown in overall performance, which is a higher rate of errors. And they've even tried to measure this. And what they found is that that suggests that this efficiency loss can be as high as 40%, to our time in our ability to make make the most of when we're trying to sit in focus. So again, that says getting back to that misconception of oh, if I multitask or five tasks, which I'll get more done, I'll be faster at this, but it slows us down. And we think oh, I could have accomplished these five tasks in one hour if I multitask. But what actually is going to happen is it's going to take you three, four, maybe five hours to get done. Because of those tasks, switching costs,
Meghan 08:26
which leads to another detriment to this multitasking framework is the quality of work that you have, it can be very stressful when it's taking you longer to produce the work. And the quality of work is also not as great think about when you're doing a pet sitting visit. And there's a fearful dog or an anxious cat that needs medications, those really elevate our stress levels. And then when we're also in those visits, but getting pings and pongs from our phone, those constant interruptions and that task switching demand not only affects our performance, but it increases that cognitive burden that leads to frustration, anxiety and mental fatigue. This heightened stress can really impact our brains function. And it creates this vicious cycle that affects our mental well being physical well being but also the quality of our work that maybe we weren't able to really focus on getting that dog that medication or the cat to come around and like us because we were so focused on Oh, I gotta answer this text, really quick text from this person. And okay, I'll get back to this now with the cat.
Collin Funkhouser 09:26
Well, and it's especially true in those high risk, high stress environments, high stakes environments, like a lot of times when we were in these pets sitting because it's over and we're on dog walks, we are already at an elevated level in our brain. And then on top of that, we try and do multiple tasks on the same time where I've got to focus on the dog, I'm getting those pings and Pong, I'm getting that phone call. Oh, I just remembered that email. Now our brain is way over capacity, and we stopped being able to pay attention and we actually get fatigued a lot easier to your
Meghan 09:53
right because when we do this all day long, and we are doing this prolonged state of multitasking it can really lead To not only the reduced quality of work, but the attention to detail decreases as well of, Oh, I forgot to put back on the counter because I was doing so many other things at once or you know that it leads to an overlook of critical information during these high stress times. And just think about how foggy you get at the end of a long day visits. So you've done 12 or 15 visits, it's not just physically tiring, but it's mentally exhausting as well, because oftentimes, we do nothing but most seemingly multitask during these days, whether it's a walk or a pet sit or what kind of dog or cat it has, or if there's traffic or, you know, the all these things that come up during our day, we don't want to add to that stress.
Collin Funkhouser 10:38
And if we're at that heightened level all day, we all know that the prolonged release of stress hormones in our bodies actually leads to serious health effects down the line. And we have those moments. I don't know if you if you're listening, if you have these moments where you've been doing a series of pet visits, and you look back and you go, why did I make that ridiculous mistake? I shouldn't have made that mistake. Why did I leave the poop bag on the counter? Why didn't I lock the front door? A lot of times, it's because we are walking around at this heightened level of stress. And we're doing too much at the same time. We cannot The reason we forgot to take the poop bag out with us is because our brain dumped that information so that it could focus on something else. It was oh, I forget about the poop bag, here's an incoming call or forget about the poop bag, this cat's looking a little stressed forget. And we don't recognize that. And this is why it's so important to have systems in place, which I know we're going to talk about here in a little bit, your
Meghan 11:29
brain can only handle so much they say you can only have be friends with like 100 or so people or you can only know like 300 people at a time. Because your brain can't take on 1000 names and phone numbers and addresses all at the same time.
Collin Funkhouser 11:44
Some more modern research on this is actually the long term impacts of chronic multitasking and research are starting to show that this may actually impair your cognitive control and your attention abilities. So long term engagement and frequent multitasking, especially with the advent of digital media has been linked to changes in cognitive control and your attentional ability to pay attention to things for a long time, it's indicating that heavy multitaskers may experience difficulties in maintaining focus on a single task, or even struggle in filtering out irrelevant information and effectively switch between tasks. And that's really key of I would if you remember going through school, and they would give you a word problem. And they'd give you all this different data to go, Hey, here's all these numbers. But in reality, you only need one or two to solve it. But it was your job to go, oh, that's irrelevant, oh, I don't need that, oh, that's not important. When we're multitasking, we become we get really bad at being able to do that. And when we're talking about pets, we're talking about client requests, we're talking about the data that clients give us for care of their home and their pets, we have to filter out a lot of things that actually may not be relevant to us. And then this causes more burden, because now Well, I can't filter it out. So to almost be important. And I've got to really slow down to read this, instead of being able to quickly skim and pull out that information is necessary. And this is especially true if you've ever tried to sit down and read a book, have you ever had to read something twice,
Meghan 13:06
or four times? Yeah. Because I'm so distracted of thinking about the problem that I had 20 minutes ago or an hour ago that I can't get engrossed in a book, because I'm just thinking about all the problems that we have, yeah,
Collin Funkhouser 13:18
or you read, I just read that same paragraph, and I didn't get anything from it. Or maybe you're at a book and I'll send you just kind of feel like you're just staring at it and you don't know what's going on. Or maybe you're unable to sit through a concert without checking your phone. These are all signs of this lack of cognitive control and attention abilities. One of the more interesting pieces of research that I came across was actually the impact of multitasking or, you know, task switching on studying. So they did these research with students. And they had some who were doing multitasking and what this was where they were trying to carry on a text conversation with a friend while they were needing to study for this exam. And then they had others who were studying, and they were not being interrupted with text messages or carrying on that conversation. And what they found was, while the multitaskers were still able to learn some of the information, they had poor outcomes, it was harder for them to recall the information. And this is because the scientists believe that the information is actually stored in the part of your brain that's for new skills, versus long term data storage. And then they had a decreased ability to adapt that information to new situations. So the information was less less flexible in their brains. So it's all a reminder of maybe you need the TV on as background noise, you know that that may be fine as long as it's not constantly pulling you back out to it. But silence the phone, turn off notifications step away from the distractions, so for a period of time, so that you can dedicate for set periods of time to learning and taking in that information.
Meghan 14:49
Yeah, I guess it's really all about knowing yourself because we're not saying that you can ever walk and talk at the same time again or you can't listen to classical music while you are reading a book. You know those are those are okay if you can handle that. But again, it's the activities that are high stakes, you don't want to mess these things up, you really need to focus, you should not be doing too high stakes level things at the same time. Before we continue, we'd like to tell you about our friends at pet sitters associates. As pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members. And that's why pet sitters Associates is here to help. for over 20 years they have provided 1000s of members with quality pet care insurance. Because you work in the pet care industry, you can take your career to the next level with flexible coverage options, client connections and complete freedom in running your business. Learn why pet sitters Associates is the perfect fit for you and get a free quote at pets@llc.com. You can get a discount when joining by clicking membership petsitter confessional and use the discount code confessional when you go to checkout, check out the benefits of membership and insurance once again, at pets@llc.com. We have to fight that urge to get too many things in front of us, we have to intentionally block out that time and make space and room for what we want to work on. Especially if it's something like taxes, we cannot mess that up. When we talk about multitasking, we're really talking about the art of paying attention. It's that ability to shift our attention and to exercise judgment about what objects are really worth our attention. We do this by first time blocking we allocate specific times during the day or during the week to different tasks. I know I need to focus on taxes every Tuesday between 10 and 11. That is my tax time I have to do that. This method here really encourages that deep focus of one task at a time. And it reduces that temptation to switch tasks. When you dedicate those specific periods to individual tasks, you minimize those distractions and you make meaningful progress. There are massive benefits for managing your energy levels. So you can schedule tasks that require more concentration during your peak activity times if you're a morning person and you love getting things done in the morning, you're not going to schedule your taxes for 10 o'clock at night. Yeah,
Collin Funkhouser 16:51
this gets back to knowing who you are and understanding yourself. We all know how our energies fluctuates throughout the day, how it comes and goes. By time blocking, you're able to go okay, my high concentration, my high focus task, those have to go during my peak energy hours. And then I can, I can actually break up my day of tasks of cognitive load tasks, and distribute those across my energy levels throughout the day to better fit you so that you don't have that frustration, you don't feel like you have to multitask to get things done. A slight variation on time blocking is actually the Pomodoro Technique. And this actually involves working on a task for just a set period of time, traditionally, this is 25 minutes. So instead of going time blocking, where I'm only going to work on this for the next hour, what Pomodoro does is it tries to pull that in and make it just a little bit smaller chunks. So what you do is you focus intensely and you do deep focus on one task for 25 minutes, then you give yourself a short five minute break. And then after you complete four of these, what are these called, these are called for Pomodoro. So these 30 minute blocks 25 of focus five a break after you complete four of these. So that's two hours, you then take a longer break. This method really helps maintain high levels of focus. And importantly, here gives you a chance in your brain to rest and relax. That helps prevent burnout. Also, the frequent breaks refresh your mind making it easier to maintain concentration over those longer stents. This is perfect for a well timed pet visit, just think of this, you have 30 minutes for the typical pet sitting visit 25 of that for the visit five minutes for the break and update, and then you can drive to the next one. So consider breaking each visit into time segments to intentionally focus on that visit alone. Then after the visit, you can work on other things, basically, you're giving yourself permission to go okay, now what's next on my plate? Okay, well, this visit is 30 minutes, I'm going to intensely focus on this, then I have a break. And then I can intensely focus
Meghan 18:50
and repeat. But again, you really need to know yourself because if I were to try this technique, I would try to stretch that five minutes into six minutes and seven minutes because Oh, there's more Facebook notifications or there's more emails, if I just get to one more, that'll be okay. Oh, just one
Collin Funkhouser 19:03
more? Well, and then what you would have to do is you would have to create one Pomodoro for social media. So you go okay, well, I have one Pomodoro for emails, and I have one Pomodoro for scheduling. And also what's important here, if we have to, when we say focus on this task, I'm only gonna work on it for 25 minutes, okay, that means that at 25 minutes, you stop working on this, you shut your computer, you stand up, and you walk away for five minutes, which means that you do have to have an organizational system to know where you were in that process, what is still left on your task and then you have to mentally be okay with walking away from something even though it might not be 100% done. But the longer we try and force ourselves to focus on something for a prolonged period of time, the less efficient that we become at that. So instead of trying to sit and work on emails and banging away at them for 6789 hours, by the way, after nine hours of writing emails, those emails do not look like the ones that you wrote within the first 10 minutes so the short bursts allowed to keep you fresh. and focused without becoming more and more distracted. When
Meghan 20:03
you are wanting to break yourself away from multitasking, think about the opposite single tasking, make a conscious effort to focus on only one task at a time, remove the distractions to put away the phone, and the computer, maybe whatever you need to do during that time, commit your full attention to that task, when you are able to do that you will improve the quality of work, you will enhance your satisfaction, you'll get less stress out of it, and you'll get more engagement with that task. Knowing the order of operations for a pet sitting visit or a dog walk is great. It will help ease that mental tension of worrying about oh, did I forget something that's his visit? I don't know. I can't my brain can't handle that right now. Because that typically typically leads to us adding more things to our plate than we can really handle. For example, if you're in a pet sit visit and you say I'm going to start filling the water bowl in the sink. While that's going, I'm gonna run over in scoop the food into the bowl and then grab the peanut butter because I have to put their pills in it. Oh, wait, how many pills do they get in the morning? Let me check my notes. Oh, well, the water bowl just overflowed. Now we've got to take time to fix that or clean that up. And it's time that you didn't need to take if you would have just watched the bowl filled with water and done one task at a time.
Collin Funkhouser 21:12
This is where the preparation comes in for every single visit, knowing what tasks are required of me, what's my expectation for making the most out of this visit outlining each one of those so that you know and you don't have to worry, am I forgetting something? Was there something else? Well, all you have to do is look at that list and know Nope, this is what I have to do. And I've got plenty of time to get it done. One method from Breaking the Habit of multitasking is one we've actually already talked about on episode 402 was called planning the perfect visit. It's about prioritizing using the Eisenhower matrix. Basically what this tool does is it helps you prioritize a task based on several things have gone their urgency and importance, dividing them into four categories is that things I need to do now scheduled later, delegate or delete. By focusing on tasks that are both urgent and important, you ensure that your energy is directed towards activities that genuinely contribute to your goals, or what you have to get done, which reduces the impulse to multitask on less critical tasks. It's about sitting down. And once you've made that task list, made that to do list. Now you have to put it in order, you have to rank those from most to least important and the Eisenhower matrix is a great way to go about doing that, especially when we may have sometimes hard time intuitively putting them in one place over the other. So going is this both urgent and important? Well, I have to get that done, which means I if I will not do anything else lower on the list until those things get done, which blinks back to the single tasking mindset.
Meghan 22:43
With the proper mindset comes mindfulness. Practicing that mindfulness meditation, it's going to enhance your ability to concentrate, reduce those distractions. When you do this regularly do this exercise of mindfulness and meditation, it can improve your brain's flexibility, allowing you to switch tasks and more efficiently when it's necessary. And maintaining that focus on current tasks without those mental costs of the traditional method of multitasking. Doing these before in between and after visits, helps ground yourself and keeps you focused, helps you unwind from the day of visit. So you can focus on your home life. Or if you are doing it before, you can take a minute with a deep breath, say Okay, here we go. I am mentally prepared, I am physically prepared, I've got lots of oxygen, here we go. In
Collin Funkhouser 23:31
importantly, this means that you have to schedule that time into your day that if you are scheduling visits, such that you don't have any time from when you arrive at the visit to when you're supposed to be inside starting it, you're not going to be able to take these mindfulness moment moments of pulling into the drive, turning off the car, making sure your phone is on silent, closing your eyes, several deep breaths and just listening to the silence. And then as thoughts come in, just push them away, maybe or write them down if they're concerned so that you don't have those on your mind or that burdening you. And that cognitive load while you're in that visit, to just empty your mind of that stuff. And then go in this doing these before I love this of doing it before you start visits in between each visits, because things build up throughout the day. And then after the visits because you want to be able to leave the visits and go do your home life stuff. Go be with friends, go be with families go unwind with out the cognitive load that is now coming from the work that you did earlier in that day. We've got to get rid of that so that we can wake up refreshed the next day, and not already starting out a mental capacity of your 80 or more percent.
Meghan 24:38
Do you agree that multitasking is a myth? How do you combat it in your personal and business life? We would love to know you can email us at feedback at petsitter confessional.com Or you can call us at 636-364-8260. Thank you very much for listening today. Thank you also to pet sitters associates and we will talk with you next time.
Collin Funkhouser 24:57
Bye
