Is multi-tasking for real? And what can we learn from alternative explanations, such as serial-tasking?
As an industry analyst, I run into memes on a daily basis. The memes form the cultural basis for a group of commonly-accepted ideas, and they influence the types of questions people ask. In technology markets, memes can be profoundly influential, leading company after company down similar paths — and to similar sets of conclusions — even despite mountains of evidence disproving the underlying premises.
For example, many people believe that we multi-task — a commonly held set of beliefs that results from the following premises:
- Between the Internet and mobile devices, people interact more frequently with technology;
- As a result, people tend to interact with devices and the Internet while doing other things, such as talking on the phone and conversing;
- People also are distracted from one technology (such as a computer or television set) by mobile devices, text messages and so on and so forth;
- This behavior — in which we shift from one communication or information source…to another — is called multi-tasking; and
- Multi-tasking makes us more productive.
Given this line of reasoning, we can spot the obvious question — is #5 true? Are we more productive when we multi-task?
This is a red herring. Like all memes, it is misleading to accept the entire premise…only to question the conclusions.
The real question is whether (a) there is such a thing as multi-tasking, and (b) if human beings are capable of multi-tasking. Fortunately, someone else has already addressed this core question. This week’s On The Media was a repeat of several really good pieces from last year and earlier in 2009. My favorite is a piece called “The Net Effect” which included the following (emphasis added):
FRANK RUSSO: I would say that we don’t actually multitask. We serial task.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Frank Russo, director of the Science of Music Auditory Research and Technology Lab at Ryerson University, says that if we could do two tasks at once we wouldn’t crash the car while talking on the phone. What we really do is flip back and forth, constantly breaking our mental flow.
FRANK RUSSO: So we might be entertaining a thought and we might be trying to think about, well, how does this fit with other things I know, how can I advance what I’m looking at and get to the next step. All of that hard cognitive work is taken away once we get that popup message. So if we’re doing something that involves some sort of complicated thought, developing an argument of any kind, it’s not going to be as efficient if we have constant disruptions.
I love that quote. because it attacks the underlying meme. If we don’t multi-task, and if we aren’t more productive, then we can start to look at the ways to truly capitalize on the serial-tasking behavior to understand how to use it effectively.
Maybe, the real goal of serial-tasking is to not be the most-ignored task in the bunch. Sort of a devil-takes-the-hindmost approach. This has profound repercussions in terms of media and technology.
Because — if we accepted the idea of multi-tasking — we’d conclude that people value each interaction equally. And we wouldn’t care about ordinal comparisons.
But if we believe in serial-tasking, the goal might be to become the 2nd or 3rd task in the group. Heck, being second-to-last has been a good business for Google.