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There are slews of papers- and much “popular” (mis)information concerning multi-tasking.  To paraphrase the old Breck commercial “Do We or Don’t We?”.

Drs. Aral (NYU), Brynjolfsson (MIT Sloan School), and  Van Alstyne (BU and MIT) published a study in 2006 describing the effect of IT use and multitasking on performance. They found worker’s greater use of IT augmented revenue generation, but it did not afford quicker project completion.  As a matter of fact, it took the workers longer to finish a single project; yet, overall completion of all projects was quicker.  (In other words [the day choices are mine], it could take nine days to finish a single project by itself and fifteen (15) days if two were performed.  However, those two projects would be finished in 15 days, for less overall time than if the two were performed consecutively (18 days).)  The relationship between multitasking and output could be explained via upside down U-shaped graph.  Productivity increases as first.  However as the subject increased multitasking, the marginal improvement decreased dramatically, until there was no improvement.  Eventually, burnout was reached and one’s performance began decreasing.  (This is akin to traffic moving down a highway; once a certain traffic level is reached, movement virtually ceases.)

An explanation of sorts could be found when examining  results published by Dr. Rene Marois (Vanderbilt) in Neuron . He  reported that a “response selection bottleneck” exists in the brain.  This bottleneck results when the brain attempts to respond to simultaneous stimuli.  This meant time was wasted (lost),  as the brain determined the hierarchy of tasks to be performed.  Dr. David Meyer (Michigan), in an interview published in New Scientist, disagrees about the bottleneck, postulating instead that “adaptive executive control” occurs.  This phenomenon involves the brain scheduling various processes, employing the priorities and order received for each task.

Dr. Nelson Cowan has a slightly different approach.  He coined the term “working memory,”for the chunks of data or information that we can simultaneously handle in our mind, at any given moment.  He found (as repored in Current Directions in Psychological Science, February 2010) that working memory is not a constant value, but varies by situation; it seems to be 3 to 5 chunks (in a matter of seconds) for young adults.

Linda Stone was cited with one of the “breakthrough ideas” (2007) by Harvard Business Review for her concept of multitasking (sort of), which she termed “continuous partial attention.”  She employed this term for our activities that involve scanning for opportunities and monitoring contacts, events, and activities in our desire to miss nothing. While not really multi-tasking, it does explain what many of us routinely each day.

Contrast all these results with those just published in the National Bureau of Economic Research by Drs. Coviello, Ichino, and Persico.  Their study (including the use of several esoteric formulae) involved 31 judges in Italy and their ability to handle multiple cases.  The authors concluded that for given workload, those judges who attempted too many tasks were slower in completing their workload, when compared to those who concentrated sequentially on just a few tasks at the same time. However, if you truly examine their data, you will find at least three of the judges who were consistently the fastest in completing tasks, and (using the researcher’s terminology) were the most frequent multi-taskers.

So, this means there really is no single solution to multitasking- or its avoidance.  We all have different abilities- some of us cannot multi-task, others can truly be considered expert jugglers.  We need to determine what works best for ourselves.  It forces me to recall how my mother would declaim, “I’m cold, put on a coat”.  To which I (of course) replied- “Put one on yourself, I’m NOT.”

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