You’ve probably heard about the dangers of multitasking. Apparently trying to do more than one thing at a time is worse for your productivity than staying up all night watching infomercials or smoking marijuana.
In one study, students took 40 percent longer to solve complicated math problems when they had to switch to other tasks. Another study showed that multitasking changes the way we learn and makes us less able to recall memories. If you’re about to click away from this article, because you’ve mastered the art of multitasking, a third study might make you think twice. It turns out heavy multitaskers are worse at doing numerous tasks than light multitaskers.
And the worst part? When we multitask, our bodies release stress hormones and adrenaline. We feel stressed, pressured, angry, and frustrated. One Australian doctor even blames multitasking for “epidemics of rage”.
Maybe you’ve heard that multitasking isn’t as hard for women as it is for men, that our brains are wired differently? Well research has debunked that as well. According to Josh Naish, a science writer at the Daily Mail, “The bulk of scientific investigation into the brain reveals no significant difference between the sexes. The widespread belief that women’s brains are naturally better at multi-tasking seems to be a myth.”
So you’re convinced? From now on, it’s all about focus. Doing one thing at a time. Paying attention.
Me too – except for one thing. I’m a parent, and I work at home. That means that I am doing at least two things every waking moment of every day. I am caretaking, i.e. reminding my three-year-old to look both ways before crossing the street, washing his hands, switching his shoes to the right feet, helping him get dressed (strangely this happens about 30 times a day), feeding him, entertaining him, helping him help me with something, etc… Meanwhile, I’m doing what needs to get done each day to keep our household and my business afloat.
Even when my son is napping or at a friend’s house, and I have some focused work time, I’m on alert, waiting for him to stir or wondering if I will get a phone call from his caretaker. Honestly I have a feeling that if parents took the multitasking research seriously and stopped, disaster would ensue.
So I like to take comfort from this bit of research on the maternal brain. At least in rats, the hormonal fluctuations during pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding reshape the female brain – increasing the size of neurons in some areas and building new structural pathways in others. “Some of these sites are involved in regulating maternal behaviors such as building nests, grooming young and protecting them from predators,” Scientific America reports. “Other affected regions, though, control memory, learning, and responses to fear and stress.” Surely our species is just as well-equipped for parenting, right?
That said, when I started working at home a couple of years ago, I had significant room for improvement in the area of focus. There was always so much to do, and I found myself not just doing one thing (caretaking) while trying to do another (checking my email). I tried to do many, many things at once. Too often I wandered around the house jumping from one task to the next, leaving everything in various stages of incompleteness.
When I recognized that, ahem, I was a multitasker, I imagined exciting solutions to my problem – a fancy smart phone app, some sort of color-coded charting system perhaps – until I stumbled onto the real solution. A simple, humble checklist.
That’s right, I wrote down everything I needed to get done each day. Then I forced myself to focus on one task, finish it, cross it off the list, and go to the next. I know, humans were most likely doing this on cave walls in hieroglyphics thousands of years ago. Here’s why – it works.
Now even when I don’t make a checklist, I take the checklist mentality into my day and force myself to do one thing at a time. Of course, I’m constantly fielding the inevitable distractions of parenting a small child – “I can’t find my bear book.” “Where are my buttons-on-the-legs pants?” “Do we have strawberries?” “I have to go potty.” – but I get loads more done and feel less frustrated.
Maybe you’re thinking that a checklist sounds kind of lame, low-tech … unglamorous. I know. But I’m not the only one singing its praises. Dr. Peter Provonost won the Macarthur Genius Award and was named one of Time Magazine‘s most influential people in 2008, because he found a way to radically decrease infection rates at his hospital, save lives, and cut millions of dollars in unnecessary expenses. His brilliant idea? He required doctors to use a checklist when inserting catheters.
So if you’re feeling harried and unsure of how to find your way out of the multitasking habit, the solution might be easier than you think. Try this: make a list and force yourself to actually use it.
Do you use checklists? Have you discovered other simple hacks for kicking the multitasking habit, or for juggle parenting with working? I’d love to hear about it.
Abby, love your blog & read it consistently. It truly inspires me to do more with my life as a single apartment dwelling Nashvillian so thank you! As for how multiple-tasking as affected my life, I can say that I never thought about ut having such a negative affect on your well-being! But this post really hit home for me this weekend as I took on the task of organizing (which mainly involves getting rid of most of my stuff for yard sale!) my very small apartment. I’ve actually been putting it off fit several months because in my head, I just had so much I wanted to do, didn’t know where to start & had the vision of completing the long list of tasks in one day. Needless to say, I spoke to Aunt about my stresses & she made me see the light in saying, “It sounds like your trying to do too much at one time & it’s overwhelming you.”. I also got some much needed advice from my sister who said she can’t make through the morning without her checklists before she goes to teach her piano students later in the day. I started on my checklists this weekend & have accomplished a lit while having an enjoyable movie & music filled time organizing! Checklists have truly kept me organized, on task, and sane through the entire organizing/cleaning process here! Thanks for the extra info on why I shouldn’t multiple-task so much & I why it’s important to write things down & stick to it!
Thanks, Emily. You’re inspiring me with all this talk of organizing. 🙂
Hi Abby – I am a great fan of the check list. I don’t understand how others survive without it. I have my “Daily Schedule” on my computer and every Sunday I print out seven copies. Then I take a few minutes to put appointments or things I must (or want to) do on the weekly schedule including social engagements with friends or family. My daily schedule includes everything …… walk and feed the dogs, take a shower, go to class (I went back to college this past year), homework …. and then I will add to it from there. The night before I use my list to create a quick daily schedule so I can make sure I am not over scheduled. It is not as if I would forget to feed or walk the dogs or take a shower …… but a schedule helps me structure my day. I think having a daily checklist frees my mind for other things. It keeps me focused and I never forget what I am supposed to do! Take care – Gayle
I think checklists are great and I’m mostly only a light multi tasker. I do find that moving on to something else can clear up writer’s block or ideas block.
Juliet
Crafty Green Poet
Multi tasking robs us of being fully present in our own lives. More can be accomplished by doing one thing at a time with a lot less stress. Focus can be developed with practice. If you’re going to use a list, keep it short…no more than a few items. Whenever you catch your mind wandering from the task at hand, silently repeat, “I am……” (whatever you’re doing at the time…even if it’s no more than washing dishes). It sounds crazy but really does work.
I’m definitely going to try that, Lisa.
Very helpful stuff here. I can really relate to these issues. I find that having a list helps me get things off my mind too.
By the way, if you want to take this to the next level of being organized, focused, and more stress free, check out the book GETTING THINGS DONE by Dave Allen (http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Productivity/dp/0142000280/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1306175683&sr=8-1). He has some insights that really hit home for me, and he does this kind of thing (helping businessmen get on top of things) for a living so he offers more then ideas and theories that work on paper.
He said something to the effect that a large part of what causes stress is having “open loops” going round and round in our heads of what we need to do. He advises getting them off of your mind and into a system you can trust. To the “list” concept, he adds what he calls the “next concrete action.” Somewhere you have a list of every thing you need to do in a different area of your life (work, home, club, this project, that project etc), but that long list can be daunting, so you keep a list of the next thing you need to do in a given area, and make an appointment to review your project “to do’s” every week or so.
Thanks, Erik. I looked at this book a long time ago, but I’m going to get at it again. I know exactly what he means about the “open loops”.
Love this post–there are days where I feel that I’m going nuts from all the toddler (and other) interruptions–I constantly forget where I was going, or what I was going to do next–I crave time to focus. I have found, like you, that the archaic checklist is the best thing to use. I like the idea of putting three important things on the list (I’ve run across this several times in blogland), so that I feel successful at the end of the day. If I put too many more than three things on the list, I feel overwhelmed by all that I have to do, and quickly get sucked back into the world of multi-tasking. My only other challenge is finding a consistent place to keep the list, because I lose them (or they walk off) repeatedly. Any ideas??? (:
Hi Wendy. Thanks for commenting. Have you tried a dry erase board or chalk board?
There’s a great book by Atul Gawande–a surgeon and staff writer for the New Yorker–called “The Checklist Manifesto”, which discusses the use of checklists in hospitals and construction sites for quality control. It’s less about individuals and more about helping prevent catastrophe in high-pressure situations, but it helps show how powerful a simple checklist can be to avoid mistakes. The book is brief, well-written, and informative.
http://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0312430000/ref=tmm_pap_title_0
Oh, yes, I use a form of a checklist to accomplish everything but that doesn’t stop me from multitasking. Honestly, while there are times it is a CHOICE and I can remind myself to slow down and focus on the task at hand (ex.when reading with one of my kids), I am not always in control of the need to multitask. I homeschool three kids all at very different ages/stages and manage a busy home/family. I am very organized but there are times when at least three different people are needing something from me at the same time as I am, say, preparing supper or trying to go to the bathroom! A friend of mine with eight children says there are times she literally has to push her kids out of the bathroom door so she can have a few minutes of privacy 😉 I absolutely realize that I deal with elevated stress levels most of the time. My teenage son is writing a paper on the benefits of physical activity and he came across a statistic that said something like ‘stress has the same negative effect on the body as smoking 17 cigarettes/day’!!!
I use checklists all the time and have a check lists for ‘today’, ‘this week’, ‘during free time’, which include tasks of different styles. For example, in the ‘today’ list, I may have ‘clean balcony’, in the ‘during free time’ list, I have ‘research language courses’. The trouble is sticking to everything!