Chasing Two Hares

Our quote of the day comes to us via Gretchen Rubin at The Happiness Project, and falls under the category of ancient wisdom for modern times:

"He who chases two hares will catch neither."
 -Publius Syrus

I've written before about the false promise of multitasking, the seductive idea that we can do more in less time by doing two (or more!) things at once.  The truth, unfortunately, is that our brains aren't wired that way.  Modern brain research continues to discover that human attention cannot be divided and still perform at the highest level.  We are fooling ourselves if we think we are boosting our output by multitasking.

Publius Syrus figured out in the first century BC what our modern scientists are explaining in detail today:  if you want to catch two hares, you have to start by catching one hare.  Chasing two at a time will not get you to your goal faster.

Have a long to-do list?  Pick the most important item that you can do right now, and do it.  Then move on to the next one.  Don't be tempted to do more than one thing at a time--you'll get more done, and what you do will be done better, and you'll be happier for it.

Forget Mustitasking

All of us are tempted to multitask nearly every day. With companies trying to do more with fewer people, the demands of work seem to be relentlessly increasing. If you have kids their schedules are packed too, and you have to be involved in that activity while managing your own affairs. Then there is the information stream we try to keep up with: news sites, blogs, Facebook updates, Twitter feeds. It is a lot of busyness, and so no wonder we are tempted to text while driving, to email while eating, and to exercise while talking on the phone.

But evidently we are fooling ourselves. On NPR's Morning Edition program today, Renee Montagne interviewed Douglas Merrill, the former CIO of Google who holds a PhD in Cognitive Science, and who recently published Getting Organized in the Google Era. According to Dr. Merrill, we are fooling ourselves when we think we can multitask:

Everyone feels like they're tremendous multitaskers. It's a little like Lake Wobegon - everyone thinks they're better than average, but you're not. You can't multitask. When you shift from one context to another you're going to drop some things. And what that means is that you're less effective at the first task and at the second task that you're trying to do at the same time. It's much more effective to spend time doing your first task, take a small break, and then do your second task. Managing the context shift is much more effective than pretending to multitask, even though we all think we're good at it.

When he says "you can't", what he means is your brain is not set up to operate that way:

Your brain has a short-term memory which it uses to store the things that happen around it in the world, and then it takes from that short-term memory and encodes into long-term memory so you can find it later. That short-term memory can hold between five and nine things and that's all. And if you're multitasking, you're more likely to forget the things that are in that short-term memory.

So, it turns out we are all fooling ourselves when we think we can get more done by doing two or more things at once. It is a false victory: we seem to do more, but in the end we do it poorly, or we forgot what we did, or we forget to do all the things we are supposed to do. Plus, Dr. Merrill goes on to say, the constant switching our attention back and forth between different contexts is actually a time-waster.

Far better, as he says, to do one thing at a time, take a short break to reset your brain, and then start on the next task. Focus on what you are doing right now--live in the present tense, we might say--and do it to the best of your ability. Of course, doing that doesn't lessen the flood of information, tasks, emails, and other demands on our time; so we have to be deliberate about setting priorities, saying no when possible, and otherwise taking control of our own lives to ensure we are accomplishing the truly important (as you can read about elsewhere on this blog).

I haven't read the book yet, but from the review it appears there might be some interesting tips and tools that Dr. Merrill suggests for helping manage all that information flow. Let me know if you've read it, and what you think.