Productivity vs Multi-Tasking: Interview with Homes & Gardens
- Madison Park Psychotherapy
- Apr 29
- 3 min read
Updated: 2 minutes ago
Most people think of themselves as excellent multi-taskers. Even if you don’t think that you’re particularly good at it, it feels like a necessity in the present age. If you want to get anything at all done, you’re going to have to do it while juggling work, motherhood, an argument with your parents, miscellaneous life-administrative tasks, and, of course, eating, sleeping, and bathing. Way back in 2007, the psychiatrist Edward Hallowell wrote in his book CrazyBusy, “Never in history has the human brain been asked to track so many data points.”[1] Slack and Microsoft Teams were launched seven years later. Life has a way of piling up and so if you’re going to do something, you’re going to have to do it at the same time as something else.
Unfortunately, for almost every task, almost every person is much worse at multi-tasking than they think. That applies to studying,[2] working,[3] and even cleaning your house. As springtime is here, Home & Gardens reached out to experts on attention and motivation to discuss the benefits of sticking to one task at a time. In “It's a 'healthy way to organize your brain' – forget multi-tasking, ‘single-tasking’ is the key to reducing household chore stress” Jordan Conrad, founder and clinical director of Madison Park Psychotherapy discusses the benefits of “single-tasking.”
Jordan explains that there are at least two problems with multi-tasking:
“The first is that when you are single-tasking, particularly when you are able to shut off extraneous distractions like phones, people are able to get into highly productive states called deep focus or deep work. In these states, people demonstrate enhanced memory retrieval works better and in general, have faster response times. Multi-tasking takes people out of these states - even a short glance at your emails or answering a text message can pull you right out of these productive states.”
That is significant. Researchers have found that information workers tend to focus on a single task for about ten and a half minutes before being distracted by another task and then it tends to be about 25 minutes before they return to the first task. That is a long time – enough time for whatever you were focusing on in the interim to affect how you are thinking about your original project. One researcher provides an example: “So, imagine I’m working on my article and then I check news and then I read something horrifying in the news — that can leave a residue. And I try to go back and focus on something else, but I keep thinking of this horrible accident. It creates interference.” [4]
Jordan explains that the second reason that multi-tasking can interfere with your work is that “there is a kind of start-up cost that occurs each time you begin a new task – even easy and familiar tasks – and that each time you pivot your attention from one place to another, you pay that price.” Jordan elaborates: "People who multitask a lot might get more done, but they are often more fatigued and their productivity often gets much worse over time. That is because the act of switching tasks takes a toll on your energy." Even when you are able to successfully multi-task it can feel worse, undermining its purpose. One research article puts it this way "Our data suggests that people compensate for interruptions by working faster, but this comes at a price: experiencing more stress, higher frustration, time pressure and effort." [3]
[2]Wang, Z., & Tchernev, J. M. (2012). The “myth” of media multitasking: Reciprocal dynamics of media multitasking, personal needs, and gratifications. Journal of communication, 62(3), 493-513.
[3]Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008, April). The cost of interrupted work: more speed and stress. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 107-110).
