Why monotasking can make you more productive

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

**David Epstein** (0:07)
True multitasking is mostly not possible. And so what your brain is doing is just toggling. And every time you do that, there's a little bit of switching cost.

**Kalyani Saxena** (0:17)
Did you catch that? Multitasking is out, and monotasking is in.
It's Friday, August 14th, and this is Here & Now Anytime. From NPR and WBUR Boston, I'm Kalyani Saxena. Today on the show, we'll spend some time enveloping ourselves in the blues music scene in Detroit. With Marsha Battle Philpot, the daughter of Joe Battle, who opened a record store there in 1945

**Marsha Battle Philpot** (0:54)
He was very, very successful, and he began to have relationships with other record companies and all kinds of stuff.

**Kalyani Saxena** (1:02)
But first, I'm going to challenge a little workplace norm. We've all been told that being a multitasker is an essential skill in the modern work world. Your bosses like it, and you may pride yourself on being good at it. Well, it's time for a bit of a reality check. The research shows that multitasking actually makes most people less productive. In fact, it makes us more stressed out and worse at our jobs.
So what should we be doing instead? Our next guest says we should actually be monotasking.
David Epstein writes about human performance and productivity. His latest book is called Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better. And he spoke with Indira Lakshmanan about his thesis.

**Indira Lakshmanan** (1:48)
So multitasking gives us the sense that we're busy, we're getting things done. You argue that multitasking actually leads us to make more mistakes, increases our stress, and makes the same work take longer. First, explain what is happening inside our brains when we try to multitask.

**David Epstein** (2:06)
True multitasking is mostly not possible. Like you can walk and have a conversation at the same time because walking is automated in your brain. But in terms of multiple cognitive tasks, you actually can't do it. So what your brain is doing is just toggling and switching. It really has to do what cognitive scientists call dropping one set of rules and activating another set of rules for a different task. Every time you do that, there's a little bit of switching cost, where if you picture your brain like a whiteboard, when you switch, you erase the whiteboard, but there's that residue from the marker still there.
A little bit of that builds up every time you task switch, and so the more you do it in a day, the more cognitive bandwidth you're losing, you're clogging up, and it doesn't reset basically until you get to sleep.

**Indira Lakshmanan** (2:56)
You looked at the research of UC Irvine psychologist Gloria Mark, who studies how humans interact with technology in daily life. More than 20 years ago back in 2003, she studied how often office workers switch tasks. Back then, it was every three minutes. More recently in 2022, office workers were switching tasks every 45 seconds. I imagine if she did that study again today, we'd be switching tasks even more rapidly. So put it plainly, what is driving us to multitask even faster than ever before?

**David Epstein** (3:32)
A lot of it is the rise of asynchronous communication. So you might have Slack, you might have email, you might have some other internal messaging system or some dashboard that's sending you notifications. Your phone obviously sends notifications. I mean, and the thing is, right, you're expected to respond quickly. And that's the very thing that's going to make you not only worse at your work, more stressed. There's a little evidence now that task switching affects your immune function. So that doesn't look great. Dr. Mark recommends what she calls blocking work.
So what she found in one of her studies was that office workers on average checked email 77 times a day.
But if you could turn that into one or two or three or even five different blocks in the day where you're doing email in that block and you're not doing something else, and then in the next block, you're doing something else and not doing email, anything you can do to reduce the number of switches, you're going to take up less of that cognitive bandwidth. You're going to be more productive by the end of the day. And really importantly, you're going to feel less stressed. And this is by physiological measures like heart rate variability that Dr. Mark and others are tracking people with at work.

**Indira Lakshmanan** (4:40)
David, I have to ask about media multitasking, which is a new term I've seen lately about using more than one digital device or media stream at the same time. So it means that people are multitasking even during their leisure time. They're texting their friends while they're watching TV. They're checking social media while they're listening to a podcast or playing video games. Are we kidding ourselves if we think we can process so much information at once?