Of Switch-Costs and Split-Focus: Dialing Back the Interrupt-Driven Life
by Maggie Jackson, Guest Columnist for FlexPaths
Thurs, 06/26/2008 - 2:58 — Maggie Jackson
Not long ago, I stood on a corner, waiting to cross a busy city street. Beside me stood a businessman shouting into a cell phone while frantically hailing a cab. So immersed was he in his digital bubble that he didn’t notice for some minutes that his colleague had found a taxi, jumped in, and was ready to roll.

This scene isn’t unusual. We see such juggling almost anywhere. A car zooms down the highway, the driver steering with one hand, texting with the other. A father sits in a classroom, eyes glued to his pda as the teacher introduces herself at the annual open house. Glance at the thicket of glowing laptops at the big business conference: is everyone taking notes, or sprinting through email as the speaker presents?

The idea of splicing our focus is so much a part of daily life that we almost can’t imagine doing just one thing. We’ve practically outgrown the term multitasking. Something bigger is afoot; now we juggle people, tasks, media streams. Consider:

• a third of teens bounce between five to eight media while doing homework.
• knowledge workers switch tasks on average every three minutes.
• two-thirds of children under six live in homes that keep the tv on half or more of the time.
• mothers multitask an average 80 hours a week, up from 40 hours in 1975.

Why are we so eager to splinter our focus? Certainly, our gadgets allow us to tote alluring alternate realities wherever we go. But that’s only part of the story. Our changing experience of time and our veneration of productivity help stoke a split-focus culture. These long-term trends set the stage for today’s interrupt-driven world.

Medieval-era monasteries pioneered the use of bells and clocks as a means of marking time. Then Industrial Age inventions of the cinema, phonograph and camera introduced the idea of mastering time. Suddenly, humans could stop, start, even preserve time. Now, we layer the moment, squeezing two or more life-bytes into each minute.

Recall as well, the legacy of efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor. Taylor was no multitasker, and yet his century-old, stopwatch-based industrial reforms shadow our work world. He sought to chop work into measurable pieces to get the job done faster. And while we’ve moved away from a manufacturing-based work world, we still fragment our lives, Taylor-style, in the name of productivity.

But is a split-focus life all that efficient?

Multitasking is a costly way to work, studies show. Moving back and forth between tasks produces “switch costs” as the brain takes time to change goals, remember the rules needed for a new task, and block out cognitive interference from the previous activity. Trying to do two things at once usually shortchanges both in terms of quality and/or speed. Simply put, there are cognitive limitations to what we can do.

The new field of “interruption science” drives home this point. Research by informatics scientist Gloria Mark reveals that an interrupted worker takes an average of 25 minutes to circle back to their original task. Along with our processing ability, our short-term memory is limited. That’s why people remember 10 percent less of the television news when there is an attention-grabbing “crawl” on the screen. Task-hopping nurtures a work culture of lost threads.

Fragmented moments are corrosive, as well, to relationships. When we give others half our attention in meetings, on conference calls, or at home, we undermine the chance for a true meeting of minds. A baby’s first job is learning to focus – in order to stay tuned to the environment and connect with others. Across our lifetimes, mutual focus is the bedrock of any social situation. Can we afford to subsist on a steady diet of snippets and glimpses of one another?

At work, “the most important aspect of effective meetings is joining the creative energy and critical thinking of several brains into a powerful problem-solving engine,” writes Intel principal engineer Nathan Zeldes in a paper on combating “infomania.” That energy “becomes lost” when participants are glued to email, he argues.

How can we dial down interruption and split-focus? We can start by valuing whole moments and realizing that they are the seedbed of both deep, creative thinking and rich, rewarding interactions. Consider what happens when we push back on hyper-multitasking:

• Creativity happens – Time-pressured workers produce innovative work on days when they feel focused, not scattered and interrupted, according to a study published in the Harvard Business Review.
• People Get In Sync – Days-old infants align their movements to the speech heard around them. Family members share linguistic and physical rhythms at the dinner table. This key social connectivity is called “entrainment,” and it can’t blossom in an interrupt-driven world.
• Events Flow Naturally – Before the invention of clocks, human life was experienced largely via event-based time. A story, conversation, daydream or ritual unfolded organically, according to its own natural rhythm and meaning. When we jump from one task to another or live shackled to the clock, we squeeze out room in our life for serendipity.

If we slow down and resist the urge to split yet another moment, we can focus on the challenges and rewards of what’s going on all around us – now. A little less multitasking ironically can help us get more out of life.

Maggie Jackson is the author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. She can be reached at www.maggie-jackson.com