Whenever I sit down and write a blog post draft for an hour, I feel so good after.
When I fully focus on one project for 4 hours, or once in a while a full day, I feel relaxed that I have nothing else on my to-do list.
But we know that in office work, we rarely get this chance. Paul Graham highlights this well in Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.
The One Thing book recommends 4 full hours a day of focus on the most important project at hand. It’s something I’m aspiring to now, but splitting between my two most important projects at 2 hours each.
So what’s the neuroscience of why it’s so bad to task switch, context switch, and multitask?
I can’t help but quote these huge sections from Quartz:
“When we attempt to multitask, we don’t actually do more than one activity at once, but quickly switch between them. And this switching is exhausting. It uses up oxygenated glucose in the brain, running down the same fuel that’s needed to focus on a task.”
“That switching comes with a biological cost that ends up making us feel tired much more quickly than if we sustain attention on one thing,” says Daniel Levitin, professor of behavioral neuroscience at McGill University. “People eat more, they take more caffeine. Often what you really need in that moment isn’t caffeine, but just a break. If you aren’t taking regular breaks every couple of hours, your brain won’t benefit from that extra cup of coffee.”
Studies have found that people who take 15-minute breaks every couple of hours end up being more productive, says Levitin. But these breaks must allow for mind-wandering, whether you’re walking, staring out the window, listening to music or reading. “Everyone gets there a different way. But surfing Facebook is not one of them,” he says. Social networks just produce more fractured attention, as you flit from one thing to the next.
Gloria Mark, professor in the department of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, says that when people are interrupted, it typically takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to their work, and most people will do two intervening tasks before going back to their original project. This switching leads to a build up of stress, she says, and so little wonder people who have high rates of neuroticism, impulsivity, and are susceptible to stress tend to switch tasks more than others.
Hal Pashler, psychology professor at UC San Diego, points out that not all attempts at multitasking are equally draining. If you’re doing something on autopilot, such as the laundry, then it makes perfect sense to read a book at the same time. But attempting to do two challenging tasks at once will lead to a drain in productivity. “You can’t do two demanding, even simple tasks, in parallel,” he adds.
One caveat is doing simple things and passive listening at once:
“Hal Pashler, psychology professor at UC San Diego, points out that not all attempts at multitasking are equally draining. If you’re doing something on autopilot, such as the laundry, then it makes perfect sense to read a book at the same time. But attempting to do two challenging tasks at once will lead to a drain in productivity. “You can’t do two demanding, even simple tasks, in parallel,” he adds.”
There’s a lot more research I want to dive into, but I must task switch to a workout right now!
https://www.apa.org/research/action/multitask
https://medium.com/helpful-human/project-fatigue-and-context-switching-bb0741e202cc