Maybe you're not up for daring, acrobatic maneuvers on a skateboard and street luge isn't your idea of a relaxing afternoon, but if you've got a busy schedule and a couple of communications devices you can participate in the great American sport of Multitasking. You've seen people doing it.
Check out that guy. He's talking on a cell phone, checking his email on a palm device, and ordering lunch at the same time. But that's nothing compared to the woman over there. She's got the cell phone and palm device going, too. She's using a wireless laptop to view the Web cam at her child's preschool and she's ordering lunch and watching the news on CNN on the TV over the bar.
Anybody can play. It's a lot like juggling except you do it with your brain.
First, let's clear something up. Multitasking isn't doing two things at once. It's switching between two or more activities while you keep track of the goals and status of all of them. That part where you keep track is the juggling part.
Jon Wee and Owen Marsh know a lot about juggling. As "The Passing Zone" they do it for a living in front of audiences around the world. They've gotten awards from the Juggler's Association and they've got five, count 'em, five Guinness world records. They'll tell you that the juggling part may be fun, but it's also hard work. You can make it easier in several ways.
The first rule is to keep it simple. Juggle fewer things. Juggle simpler things.
When you juggle two or more things, you not only have to pay attention to the things themselves, you also have to pay attention to the act of juggling. You need brainpower for the tasks themselves and for the act of coordination. It's like adding another task.
Your brain has limits to what it can handle at any one time. A study published in the journal NeuroImage found that juggling two mental tasks at once reduces the brainpower that's available for either task.
Slow down. Every time you switch tasks you expend mental energy. Make the time bites a little bigger and you've got more energy for the tasks themselves. The more tasks you try to juggle, the more complex they are, and the faster you go, the more energy you'll have to put into the juggling itself, and the more likely you'll be to drop one of those balls you're juggling.
Here's rule number two. Some of the balls you're juggling are probably made of glass. They should be juggled very, very carefully because you don't want to drop them or they'll break. For most of us, our relationships are glass balls.
Sue Shellenbarger of the Wall Street Journal tells the story of trying to become more efficient by sorting mail while she watched TV with her daughter. It was something the two did often that they both enjoyed. Sue thought she was doing great until she looked up from her sorting and realized that her daughter had left the room. She decided the relationship was worth more than a gain in efficiency and there was no more mail sorting during TV time.
Some tasks shouldn't be juggled at all. There are some complex tasks in your life that require lots of thought and uninterrupted time.
Let's say you've got a report to write for work. You know that the time to complete it, including your research, should be about three hours. That's true if you do the work in large, concentrated chunks. But if you try to break up the report project into fifteen minute segments sandwiched in among other work, you're likely to produce an awful report if you get the job done at all.
There's a lot of research on this, and some of the best is by Doctor Ernest Rossi. Rossi's research on our natural daily rhythms clearly indicates that complex mental work is best done in blocks of an hour and a half or so, with breaks in between.
Don't take this to mean that switching tasks is all bad or all dangerous. It's not. In fact, switching activities can aid in rest and recovery and add spice to life.
Dr James Loehr and others have pointed out that a physical task can provide rest and rejuvenation after mental work. The same thing can happen when you follow a bout of language work with visual tasks. Variety can, indeed, make your life more interesting as long as it doesn't come at you too fast. Then it can be dangerous.
Some researchers, including Dr. David Meyer of the University of Michigan, even believe that too much multitasking can actually cause brain damage. He says that constantly switching between tasks and trying to keep track of the process generates stress, and that stress can actually damage your brain over time.
I don't know about you, but I need to keep all the brain power I can. Here's my suggestion. Join me in opting out of the great Extreme Multitasking Games. Juggle what you must and juggle as few things at a time as possible. When you juggle, keep things simple and be very careful of those glass balls. None of us wants to drop any of them.
