← All episodes Episode 03 · Focus & Attention

Why Multitasking Is Slowing You Down

Task Switching

There's no such thing as parallel attention. Every 'multitask' is rapid switching, and every switch costs you measurably.

The Science

Treisman & Gelade (Cognitive Psychology, 1980): Feature-Integration Theory shows that attention must be directed serially across each stimulus whenever conjunctions of more than one separable feature are needed. The attentional 'spotlight' is one-at-a-time.
Rubinstein, Meyer & Evans (J. Experimental Psychology: Human Perception, 2001): every task switch forces the prefrontal cortex to log out of one task set and load another. Switch-cost is real and additive, reducing productivity by ~40% on complex tasks.
Pashler (Psychological Bulletin, 1994): even the mere presence of a second concurrent task creates a Psychological Refractory Period, in which response to the second task slows because central processing is serially bottlenecked.
Ward et al. (J. Consumer Research, 2017): even the presence of a silenced smartphone in the room measurably reduces available working-memory capacity. Cognitive resources are recruited just to keep the phone in attention's blind spot.

One tab. One task. If you need to look something up, finish the paragraph first.
Phone in another room. Pocket and face-down both fail (Ward et al.).
Batch all notifications into one 5-min window every 90 minutes, align with your ultradian rhythm (V1).

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Treisman, A. M., & Gelade, G. (1980). A feature-integration theory of attention. Cognitive Psychology, 12(1): 97-136.
Rubinstein, J. S., Meyer, D. E., & Evans, J. E. (2001). Executive control of cognitive processes in task switching. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27(4): 763-797.
Ward, A. F., Duke, K., Gneezy, A., & Bos, M. W. (2017). Brain drain: The mere presence of one's own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2(2): 140-154.

Educational content only. Not medical advice.

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