I’m not sure what compelled one of my high school teachers to say what she did nearly four decades ago, but I never forgot it.
Given what I’ve learned since, I’m trying to erase it from my mind.
Here’s what happened: Our class had been assigned to write a paper. A day or so after they were turned in and graded, Mrs. Alice King, my small Kansas high school’s legendary history instructor, stood in front of us with a frown and proceeded to scold us collectively for the horrible job we’d done. The papers were awful, she said, and the entire class would have to re-do the assignment.
All except for me.
Mrs. King singled out my paper, saying mine was the very example of what she was looking for when she gave the assignment. She then paused and asked the class: “What do you see Bill doing a lot of the time?”
Stone silence from my classmates. And embarrassment on my part as my heart seized up. I stared down at my desk, pencil in hand, where I’d been drawing cartoon figures in my notebook.
“Besides doodling,” she said.
The apparent secret to my paper, she said, was how much time I spent reading. Mrs. King spoke about how often she’d see me with my nose in a book. I would even occasionally be caught reading during her lectures. I had the ability to pay attention in class and successfully complete assignments, she reasoned, because I read so much. And reading — even during class — had to be the key to the quality of my paper.
It was at this point that Mrs. King declared: “Bill is the only person in this class who has my permission to do more than one thing at a time.”
So there you have it: I was awarded a hall pass to multitask.
What I didn’t realize then was that some of my reading (typically golf magazines hidden inside textbooks, or a Stephen King novel) and my doodling were boredom relievers, distractions from having to fully focus on a class lecture. I could do that and still hear enough of the lecture to manage to get good grades.
For years afterward I thought of myself as a skilled multitasker.
I had permission, right?
I’ve learned, though, as I’ve grown older, that I’m not that talented. And that multitasking isn’t a real skill.
In adulthood, that distractibility has made it easy to try to juggle multiple tasks simultaneously. I’ve noticed it in others, too. We pat ourselves on the back for being so busy, for doing so many things at once.
But are we more effective? Are we doing all of those things well?
The short answer: no.
For the multitasker, apparently, effectiveness is an impossibility.
Proof can be found in the fact that the average American with a smartphone picks up the device around 150 times a day, according to Reviews.org — the main source, now, of our distraction. The dopamine addiction we get from a new email message, a “like” on a Facebook post or a text from a friend is powerful — so powerful, we know now, that we’ll be on the lookout for those things even as we’re engaged in another task, or other tasks.
I was particularly struck by this powerful lure a decade ago, when smartphones really began to be so prevalent. I spent a few days in Austin, Texas, at an international “mobile summit” for newspaper editors. One of the themes of the conference was the growing use of smartphones as tools for news consumption. Because there were a lot of techies and social platform X, formerly called Twitter, users at the conference, there was a whole lotta tweetin’ going on. It was fascinating for me to observe people watching presentations and tweeting about them at the same time. One speaker even live-tweeted as she presented.
It was then that I realized my people-watching, and scanning Twitter for updates to what I was watching in person, was a clear symptom of my own distractibility.
Studies have shown the brain can’t fully focus on more than one task at a time, so multitaskers are prone to error as the brain continually re-starts and re-focuses as they shift back and forth. Multitaskers suffer from memory problems, and research reveals that the more likely you are to consider yourself good at multitasking, the worse you are at it. Multitasking lowers your IQ and even changes your personality. A study at the University of Sussex used MRI brain scans to show that density in the area of the brain responsible for empathy and cognitive and emotional control is actually impaired among high multitaskers.
We think we’re getting away with it, but clearly we’re not.
Alas, contrary to Mrs. King’s claims, I’m not the exception.
I’ve used the “I have Mrs. King’s permission to do two things at once” line on my wife Lee Ann so often that she rolls her eyes when the words start coming out of my mouth. She knows me too well, and knows the truth: traction, or single-minded, dedicated focus, is a far better objective than distraction. Shifting focus to things that don’t matter is never a good plan.
The simple truth that drives our desire for distraction (with credit to “Indistractible” author Nir Eyal): multitasking is a bad habit born out of a yearning to distract ourselves with lower-stakes actions where we expect a more certain outcome.
It beats being focused, which is the harder, and better, path.
That’s why I’m working on retiring my multitasking pass.
Read CityView Magazine’s “Back to School” August 2024 e-edition here.
