Brain juggling

There is one thing that acts strongly against us simply choosing to switch off. Technology plays to the natural distractibility of human nature and our compulsion to embrace uncertainty and novelty (Fitz et al., 2019). Every time the new mail notification flashes up on screen, the red dot appears against an app, or our phone vibrates, we feel the need to take a look, regardless of what else we are doing. The vast majority of these alerts lead us to irrelevant, routine or junk stuff. However, there is the occasional “reward” — an important document or good news — that motivates us to keep checking for incoming messages even when we should really be paying attention to other things (like walking in a straight line or being at a meeting). In addition, the accomplishment we feel when we reach the end of our email inbox or send that witty tweet tends to be easier to achieve than doing all those other, more complex tasks on our “to do” list.

One problem with this is that the frequency of distraction is inversely correlated with productivity (Duke and Monta, 2017; Fitz et al., 2019). As we compulsively check incoming messages, the less productive we become. A number of studies have also cited a close relationship between stress and the amount of times we check our devices (e.g. Lee et al., 2014; Brod, 1984; Thomee et al., 2011). Turning alerts off is an obvious solution, but there is evidence that this can make people more anxious, as FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) kicks in (Fitz et al., 2019). The most stressed individuals can even imagine “phantom” alerts and compulsively check their devices even when there is nothing coming in (Kruger & Djerf, 2017).

One of the big reasons that technology is more distracting now than it used to be is that the alerts from devices are increasingly social in nature. Devices alert us to messages, voicemails and even the locations of our friends and colleagues, whereas previously they might only send out alerts when they were out of batteries. These social alerts are hard to tune out. You can ignore the

The balanced communications diet for business 115 ping of a washing machine when it has finished a spin cycle, but you can’t ignore your boss. This tends to result in us attempting to multitask.

Multitasking (attempting to perform two or more tasks simultaneously), or task switching (when you are interrupted mid-task) are effectively the mental equivalent ofjuggling. If you have ever closed your laptop down at the end of the day and found a multitude of half-finished email replies, chat sessions and half-completed documents, you have probably been doing one or the other. Academics have long known that task-switching has a detrimental effect on productivity, even for simple tasks (e.g. Rogers & Monsell, 1995). The results are even worse for complex tasks (e.g. Rubinstein et al., 2001). Although switch costs may be small, sometimes just a few tenths of a second per switch, they can add up to large amounts of time wasted when people switch repeatedly back and forth between tasks. Task switching can also impede memory and knowledge retention, particularly for interruptions mid-task. Interruptions reduce our ability to pay attention (Ophir et al., 2009), complete tasks, reduce task accuracy (Montag & Walla, 2016), and increases the time we take to complete tasks (Cellier & Eyrolle, 1992).

This means that multitasking may look productive, but it may actually take more time and involve more errors. Research from Stanford University (Ophir et al., 2009) has shown that people who regard themselves as good at multitasking are generally worse at judging the quality of information that they are reading and worse at recalling what they have done. This means that they are often less productive than people who are single taskers.

Multitasking can also be exhausting (Mark et al., 2008; Monicque et al., 2009). Paying attention to one thing whilst doing another means that we need to do more work to maintain any level of attention on either task. Sitting in a meeting doing email on your phone generally means either the meeting or the email gets short shrift. The lesson here? The average person is generally unaware of the cognitive effect that technology is having on their life.

Ultimately, much of this boils down to stress because of the sheer number of things that are simultaneously competing for our attention — “information overload” (Tarafdar et al., 2010). Being able to prioritise in overload situations is extremely difficult and can result in us going up a number of productivity cul-de-sacs. Having the self-control to close everything down and concentrate on a single task until it is finished is probably the biggest challenge but the key to better productivity.