On a visit to Hong Kong a while ago, I was walking through the streets and I noticed that almost everyone had a mobile phone stuck to their ear. I was thinking that maybe some of these people had the phone grafted to their ear. And then, standing on a moving stairway, I saw something quite unexpected. I saw a man who had two mobile phones; one stuck to each ear. As far as I could tell he was having two conversations at once. How is that possible?

Actually, it isn’t and that’s the point here.

There’s a little experiment you can do to demonstrate a simple but very important psychological fact: We are not built for multitasking!

Here it is:

While sitting at your desk make circles in a clockwise direction with your right foot. Now write the number 6 in the air with your right hand. When you do this, your foot will change direction and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it.

This is similar to the attempt to pat your head (up and down) while rubbing your stomach in a circular direction. What it demonstrates is that we find it very hard to divide our attention into two independent parts. Maybe if you spent hours practicing you would be able to do it. Maybe the man I saw in Hong Kong mobile phone Kung Fu master – but I doubt it.

Psychological Effort

I came across that exercise on http://www.jeffbridges.com, a handwritten web site. The web site is distinctive, but also off-putting. It’s because reading handwriting requires more effort than reading a type face. It’s psychological effort, which we’re not good at measuring, but it’s real enough. We don’t like to make psychological effort any more than we like to make physical effort. When we learn a foreign language we begin by translating into our own language and then trying to understand what was said or read. After a while we start to think in the foreign language, because we make it automatic.

We like to automate our habits. We seem to work like a computer’s cpu. Cpus expend effort when they switch from one program to another. It’s called a context switch. You’re the cpu and you have all these instructions lined up to execute against a nicely lined up set of data. Suddenly the OS says, “drop that spreadsheet stuff, the user wants to display a web page.” So you unload all the spreadsheet instructions and data from the cache and you go find the last used state of the browser and load it into the cache and you fire up the web page.

Well it doesn’t happen exactly like that, but it’s a reasonable analogy – and we work the same way. Let’s say that we’re checking our email and someone phones us, so we drop the email activity and engage in conversation and then the conversation ends and we are no longer able to remember the next thing we were going to write in the email, so we reread it from the beginning. We try to “reload” it.

Multitasking is inherently inefficient because of the context switches. Not only that, but we have a limited capacity. Psychology professors Edward Awh and Edward Vogel, who have worked in this area at the University of Oregon, conclude that the average human brain has a capacity of 4 concurrent thoughts. According to a study they have written, “People with high IQs can think about more things at once”, but not many more. According to Awh, “Even though people with high IQs can think about more things at once, there are no guarantees about how good those memories might be.”

You can “appear to” cheat your limit by associating lots of things together in a chain. Consider the feats of the memory performers who are introduced one-by-one to an audience of several hundred people and can remember everyone’s name. They do it by chaining names and faces together using a mnemonic technique, so that they store all the data in an orderly and retrievable fashion. They thus reduce it all to a single mental task.

So What?

So quite a lot. Multitasking is the enemy of productivity. For knowledge workers (people like me who spend hours at a computer screen and don’t have a life) productivity comes down to reducing or eliminating multitasking. Randomly generated multitasking causes stress. Phone calls coming in cause stress. I can turn my direct line into voice message mode to reduce such stress. I rarely give out my mobile phone number because I hate getting calls when I’m on the move – but I need it to make calls when I’m on the move. It means I get very few mobile calls. I use email, in preference to chat or text messages, so that I never get interrupted suddenly. I check for email at most every hour.

If you’re feeling stressed, look to see if it’s a multitasking problem and if it is, change something.

I am wrestling with the modern age. It wants to push adverts at me all the time; billboards on the road, posters on walls, jingles on the radio, overlays and interminable advertising breaks on the television, animated ads on web sites – I’m the consumer and yet it’s trying to consume me.

A Kaiser Family Foundation study of students in grades 7 through 12 makes depressing reading in this regard. The study reports 53% consuming another medium while watching TV; 58% while reading; 62% while using a computer; and 63% while listening to music. Our kids are inured to the media-driven-interruption-hell and yet their brains are just as vulnerable as ours to overload. They think that multitasking is normal and so it is becoming.

In conclusion

Stats from a year ago declare that the global ring tone market is worth more than $3.5 billion annually – that’s about 50 cents per person per year on the planet. It’s astonishing, bewildering and yet so predictable. Our children are actually paying big bucks for the instruments that lobotomize them.