Multitasking Doesn’t Work. So Why Do We Keep Trying?

Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner, with an announcement: on Thursday evening, September 26th, I’ll be doing a live show in New York City with my friend PJ Vogt from the podcast Search Engine. The event is called “A Questionable Evening: A strategic interrogation from two people who ask questions for a living.” So come see us! Thursday, September 26th, at the Bell House in Brooklyn. Doors open 6:30, show at 7. You have to be 21 to attend. Tickets available at: thebellhouseny.com or eventbrite.com; you can also find the link in our show notes. Hope to see you there! And now, today’s episode:

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I have a question: what are you doing right now? That’s easy: you are listening to this podcast. At least you are partially listening. If you’re like most people, you’re probably doing something else at the same time. Walking your dog, maybe; doing some housework, or deskwork, or maybe coding; you could be running a table saw! We all know what this is called: multitasking. A name taken from the early computing era, and now applied to humans. It is almost a philosophy: this is who we are, and this is what we do. But there are some other things to be said about multitasking. Things that are not widely known.

Gloria MARK: It’s known within academic circles, but I guess we have failed to bring it out into the general public.

And so on today’s episode of Freakonomics Radio, which you are kind of listening to, we will tell you what the academics have failed to tell you. There is some surprising science on multitasking:

David STRAYER: It tells us something about the basic architecture of our brains.

Most important, we’ll hear whether multitasking works. And we’ll hear from someone who opposes multitasking — and yet helps sell a product that promotes it:  

Olivia GRACE: Yeah, I think it’s a reasonable paradox to present.

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Olivia Grace is a well-educated, well-established professional, born in southeast England and now living in San Francisco. When she was in her twenties, trying to decide on a career, she took a series of tests to become an air traffic controller.

GRACE: Effectively what you’re doing is, you’re sat at a computer. And they’re like, “Hey, the main screen is going to show you simple math.” And they made it clear that there’s going to be multiple tasks. And so they’re not just judging you on the speed at which you do simple maths; they’re judging you on the speed and accuracy with which you do simple maths whilst also judging you on the speed and accuracy with which you do other tasks. You start it — two plus two is four, three times three is nine, yeah, I’m doing it, and it’s going great. And then they’re like, “Okay, every time this light is red, push the other button.” You’re like, “Okay, two plus two is four, light is red, push the button. Two plus two is four, light is red, push the button.” And then they’re like, “Okay, the last one, and this is the most important one, is there’s a third area of the screen where two dots are going to fly across a square.” Like, imagine Pong, but without the paddles.

DUBNER: Or imagine being an air-traffic controller, and you’re looking for planes on your screen?

GRACE: Yeah. The two dots are effectively planes. And if they are going to collide, push the button. If they are not going to collide, do not push the button. And if you get it wrong and they do collide — very bad, very bad.

DUBNER: Looking back on the experience, would you say that they were essentially testing for the ability to multitask?

GRACE: I would say that they were essentially testing for the ability to prioritize, rather than the ability to multitask. That seems to be the conventional wisdom, right now, at least, is saying that actually you’re doing things in sequence. And so the piece that was really crux was, in that early example, “Don’t let the two dots touch.” If the math isn’t quite perfect or you’d miss a red light, that’s less important, but don’t let those dots touch.

DUBNER: I know there were several rounds of this testing. I gather you did not get cut in the first round. 

GRACE: I did not get cut in round one.

DUBNER: Congratulations. 

GRACE: Thank you. I was proud of myself at the time. 

DUBNER: And yet you’re not an air-traffic controller today, so — 

GRACE: No, my air traffic control career was cut short in round three.

Olivia Grace did go on to other jobs.

GRACE: Yeah, absolutely. I went air-show organization, video-game influencer, commercial value and asset management, World of Warcraft podcaster, straight through that into World of Warcraft video-podcasting, gaming journalism, and then of course, just like everyone else, product management. I went to a game company called Blizzard that makes video games. And I went to a company called Twitch, that is live-streaming. I went and hung out at Instagram for a while, and now I’m here at —.

We’ll tell you later where Olivia Grace works today. It’s relevant to our story. But, let’s first examine something important she said — that the air-traffic controller test wasn’t really about multitasking, about doing two or three things simultaneously. Remember what she said: “the conventional wisdom, right now at least, is that you’re actually doing things in sequence.” Now, Grace is not a scientist, or a multitasking scholar. But we found someone who is — and according to him, Olivia Grace was exactly right.

STRAYER: For most of us, what we’re really doing is switching our attention between task one and task two and task one and task two. When you’re doing task one, you’re not paying attention to task two, and there’s a switch cost involved in switching the mental architecture from one task to the next.

That is David Strayer.

STRAYER: I’m a professor in the psychology department in the University of Utah.

DUBNER: And how would you describe your research interests, or particular focus?

STRAYER: My research is really focused on various aspects of attention, selectively processing some of the environment, attention and multitasking, attention in real-world contexts, like driving, aviation, and so forth.

We’ve spoken with David Strayer before. Episode 548; it’s called “Why Is the U.S. So Good at Killing Pedestrians?”

STRAYER: The four things that are killing people are speeding, alcohol and intoxication, fatigue, and distraction. Distraction has been prevalent for a long time, but increasing quite rapidly. And we think that that’s one of the major reasons for the increase in the number of roadway fatalities. 

Strayer knows much of what he knows because of the experiments he runs at his Applied Cognition Laboratory in Salt Lake City. Often, he measures how people perform one task once they are given a second task.

STRAYER: We think about multitasking as trying to do two separate, cognitively based tasks at the same time. A classic example, one that just about everybody attempts to do, is drive a car and talk on a cell phone. We don’t do that well, and more and more people have these gadgets in the car they bring with them, or the car itself becomes a platform for multitasking, and we don’t do it well. So, it’s probably a big source for the injuries and fatalities and crashes on the road.

DUBNER: Now, it would seem obvious — at least to me, maybe I’m wrong — that not all multitasking is either difficult, and certainly not as dangerous, as driving in a car and trying to do something else that’s cognitively and/or physically demanding. Can you give me some examples of what you see as benign or, in fact, productive multitasking?

STRAYER: I would actually just say that even the simplest things, like walking and talking, which you’d think would be pretty automatic, turn out to be tasks that compete. So, if you’re walking without talking, as soon as you start talking, you’ll see that the pace of your walk changes, and you may be more likely to trip. Anything that is depending on attention to be able to process the world is susceptible to dual-task interference, or problems associated with multitasking. A simple example we give is saying the letters of the alphabet: “ABCDE,” or counting, “one, two, three, four, five.” Those are easy. But if you try and combine them and do something like, “A1, B2, C3, D4,” you’ll quickly find that that becomes difficult, you start to forget where you are. And those are two super-well-learned tasks that you can do by themselves. But when you try and mix them together, you get all jumbled.  As soon as you start to multitask, performance on both of the tasks start to degrade.

DUBNER: Now, how much of that is a function of attempting to multitask versus the fact that we learn habits and patterns and memorize things that become rote, that we don’t need to engage our cognitive process at all? 

STRAYER: You can become automatic at certain aspects of performance. When your performance is habitual or automatic, it is less dependent on attention. So, a lot of things kind of just happen without consciously thinking about them. But new things, new activities or new environments, demand you to pay attention, to allocate the prefrontal cortex to process some of that information that’s new and novel. That’s the real problem, is that if you’re always in a situation where everything’s exactly routine, you’re not stressing the parts of the brain that are responsible for multitasking. But as soon as you have some novel activity — like talking, like driving a car, riding a bicycle — you have to pay attention to what you’re doing. You have to engage the prefrontal executive attentional networks.

DUBNER: Do you know anything, or think much about, multitasking and multitasking failures in other high-stakes settings beyond driving, whether it’s military decisions or political decisions, business decisions?

STRAYER: So we’ve looked in the medical domain, medical human factors. You can see it in terms of, say, delivery of medicine at a pharmacy. If the pharmacist is constantly being interrupted with calls, they’re going to fill the prescription incorrectly. If an anesthesiologist or a surgeon is distracted by the technology in the operating room, that can create a problem. In the operating room, it’s not just the phone, although that’s sometimes present, but you have all the displays and technology. Each one of those are creating alarms that creates this whirl of noise, and alerts and distractions that compete for the anesthesiologists and the surgeon’s attention.

DUBNER: So I’ve been reading about how the modern worker, let’s say in the U.S. — they could be in marketing, they could be at a nonprofit, could be in finance, whatever — that if you’re working with a computer, which describes many, many, many, many of us now obviously, that one big change in the last 15 or 20 years is how many pieces of software and how many platforms are — I don’t want to say fighting for your attention necessarily, that sounds a little a little more pejorative than I mean it to be, but how in the course of your workday, you need to switch and switch and switch and switch. We all may have multiple pieces of communication software, multiple pieces of productivity software, and so on. Can you talk about that, what seems to be a relatively low-stakes environment — the workplace in a marketing firm or whatever — but how our attention is being carved up during the course of the day? 

STRAYER: I mean, the research shows that you have a loss of productivity when you’re trying to multitask — just the opposite of what you think. So you may think “If I’m multitasking, I’m going to get a lot more things done.” But what happens is, a big chunk of our day is lost as we’re switching from one task to the other to the other. What they find is that the best way to be productive in the office is to try and focus on one task at a time, focus on just sending that memo out, writing that email, doing whatever that operation is for a short period of time, then take a break and then come back to it. Don’t try and juggle back and forth because you’ll get confused, you’ll get lost, you’ll be this — “Where was I?” kind of switch cost. 

I was pleased to learn from David Strayer that most of us are really not capable of multitasking. I’ve been thinking about this topic for a while now, although I wouldn’t call myself a neutral observer. I have come to believe that most of us are being asked to pay more and more attention to a variety of alerts and notifications — of the digital and analog varieties — and that we try to satisfy this demand, but usually fail. But then: we pretend that our failure is still some kind of victory. Because we’re getting two things done at once; because we are (allegedly) being “more productive.” As for me? I have come to see things a bit differently. I have come to believe that attention is a scarce and valuable resource, and that distraction is common and cheap; and distraction, therefore, usually wins out. For anyone who even occasionally tries to do what is called “deep work,” you will know what I’m talking about. The work might be coding or crafting something, reading or writing something, thinking through a big problem. There are approximately one billion podcasts and books that tell you how to create the environment to do deep work. That alone tells us how distracting many of our environments have become. Now, this is hardly a new problem. I love the story of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, living in 19th-century Germany and complaining about the noisy horse traffic on the streets outside his window. This distraction, he wrote, “paralyzes the brain … and murders thought.”

Now, it could be that I am a bad sample. It could be that I am someone who gets distracted too easily. I am the kind of person who disables as many notifications as possible from as many pieces of software and hardware as I can. I also decline digital calendar invitations, because I don’t find them at all inviting; I find that they harass you into compliance. Also: when I’ve met someone and they’re giving me their email address or phone number to type into my phone, and they keep talking while I’m trying to do that, I have to say, “Hey, gimme a minute, I really can’t type and listen to you at the same time.” So, yeah, that’s me. Is multitasking as hard for others as it is for me? Does it feel as costly to others as it does for me? That’s what I wanted to find out. As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, the word multitasking originated with computers. But I have also read that even computers don’t actually multitask; their operating systems direct programs to toggle between tasks, but at such fast speeds that we think they’re happening simultaneously. And now that so many of us are trying to act like computers, I thought it made sense to talk to someone who knows about that.

MARK: My name is Gloria Mark. I’m a professor at University of California, Irvine. I study human-computer interaction.

Mark trained as a psychologist.

MARK: My interest is primarily in attention and cognition. What happens when a person is interacting with a computer? How does that affect their ability to focus? When are they distracted? Why are they distracted?

She started doing this research back in the early 2000s, with a research assistant and a stopwatch.

MARK: We were able to get access to companies, and we would shadow information workers. These are people whose primary task is dealing with digital information.

DUBNER: Can you name a firm or two, or at least a type of firm? 

MARK: I can’t give you the name, because they prefer to be anonymous. One was a financial services company, another was a medical device firm, and the third was a tech firm. The work was cognitively demanding. People had to answer emails, they had to do analyses using Excel spreadsheets. Some people had to write reports. Managers did whatever managers do. And we would shadow people, and every time people switched their attention to do something else, we would click that stopwatch. That person opens a Word document, start time. They switch to email — okay, stop time for the Word document, start time for the email. And we did that throughout the day. 

DUBNER: And help me understand — you and/or, like, there are two of you, you and your grad-student researcher? I’m just trying to draw the picture in my mind. The two of you are going into these firms, in a real work situation, and you’re kind of standing around, or maybe standing near people or looking over their shoulders with stopwatches, yes? 

MARK: That’s right. 

DUBNER: Look, I love that you’re getting up close and personal, because the data sounds like it could be deliciously robust. On the other hand, what about the observer effect? These people know that you’re standing there. How do you account for that? Do you hope that they just get used to you, or how does that work? 

MARK: It was definitely something we were concerned about. So we always threw out the first, like, half-day of data, with the assumption that people were going to be posturing. But when you observe people in a real workplace, you discover very quickly that people have to react to the demands of the workplace. So they might try to posture, there might be things that they wouldn’t do if they see an observer looking over their shoulder but, by and large, they just have to react to the demands of other people, the demands of their work. I will also mention that in 2003, when we started doing this, the stopwatch was the state-of-the-art technology at the time to be able to capture this. 

DUBNER: But eventually, you could basically just monitor them internally from what they were doing on their computers?

MARK: That’s right. We could install logging programs that would detect every time people clicked on a window and brought it to the forefront. 

Okay, so what did Gloria Mark discover with her stopwatch and her logging software? That’s coming up.

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Gloria Mark has been doing field experiments for years to see how people pay attention in their workplace, to see how long they focus on the main task before another task interferes.

MARK: Back in 2003, we actually measured everything that people did — you know, when they were in an interaction with another person, when they were reading books offline. I mean, we measured everything. But if we just looked at the data when people were on their screens, we found that their attention spans averaged about two-and-a-half minutes.

DUBNER: And that means that for two-and-a-half minutes, you are in an unbroken fashion directing your cognitive power toward the task at hand. Is that what’s going on?

MARK: To the extent that this can be measured empirically, because sometimes we don’t know what’s going on inside people’s heads.

DUBNER: I could be thinking about the discussion I want to have at home with my kids later while I’m typing, for instance.

MARK: Sure, yeah.

DUBNER: But two-and-a-half minutes. So that sounds, on the one hand, terrible. On the other hand, I have a feeling that compared to 2024, two-and-a-half minutes might not be so terrible. That’s my intuition. Can you tell me what’s the actuality?

MARK: Yes, you are right. We did another study in 2012 — at this time we were using computer software logging, so we could get very accurate measures — and we found that people averaged about 75 seconds.

DUBNER: So that’s a massive decline in attention span in a relatively short period of time. Why were you asking this question in your research? Did you just want to observe the length of an attention span for the sake of observing it, and how it changed over time? Were you trying to figure out what were the causes, what were the consequences? What was your mission?

MARK: I would say all of the above. I was very interested to understand people’s ability or inability to focus. And I wanted to know, how is that related to stress? It turns out, the faster people switch attention, the greater is their stress.

DUBNER: For the average person, who thinks that they are quite adept at multitasking, are they deluded? 

MARK: Yes, they are. And there’s three reasons. First of all, people may feel that they’re accomplishing more when they multitask. But people make more errors when they’re switching their attention rapidly. Another thing is that there’s what’s called a switch cost when we think we’re multitasking. A switch cost is the extra time it takes to reorient to this new task. The biggest cost that we found relates to the third reason why multitasking is bad, and that is because it causes stress. It’s not just correlation of shifting attention and stress, but it actually causes stress.

DUBNER: But I’m sure this operates on a spectrum. What would you say are the characteristics of people who are better than average at, if not multitasking, at least accelerated toggling? I would assume that younger people are much better than older people?

MARK: Yes, younger people tend to be better. Young people who have experience playing certain computer games seem to have acquired a skill to be able to switch better. 

DUBNER: I’d like you to talk for a moment about what you psychologists call the Zeigarnik effect, and explain how that intersects with attention span and/or multitasking.

MARK: So, Bluma Zeigarnik was a very interesting person, and about 100 years ago at the University of Berlin, she did a study where she would interrupt people, as they were working on various tasks, and then she would measure their recall of their different tasks. And she found that when people were interrupted, they remembered those tasks better than those tasks that were finished. And, you know, when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense because you’ve got this unfinished task and it’s just churning over and over in your mind, and you’re very anxious about it because you haven’t finished it.

DUBNER: I was going to ask you a question that I thought was too obvious to ask, which is, “Why do we want to multitask?” And I assumed the answer was, Well, because we want to get more stuff done, or we want to appear to be the kind of people who are very productive or cooperative or whatnot. But now that you’re talking about Bluma Zeigarnik, it makes me wonder if it’s driven by a different need, which is the need to resolve conflict, to get rid of that tension of the unfinished task.

MARK: I do think that plays a role, and I think there are a lot of reasons why people multitask. We found in our research that people interrupt themselves about half the time. So I do think that wanting to resolve conflicts in a number of ways — so you have this memory of, “Oh, that email that I didn’t answer.” Or “Oh, that person who I have to call back.” Very often, a thought will pop into my head, of some silly question, and I just can’t get it out of my mind, and I have to look it up on the internet to be able to resolve it. Why do I do it? It’s because the internet is so close at hand, and because I can get that answer within milliseconds, that’s why I do it. And I’ve developed a habit, and I know that there will be resolution after I look up that answer.

We had asked Gloria Mark to come to the studio with a test that she could give me, a basic test designed to show the relationship between multitasking and stress.

MARK: Before we start, I want to get a baseline stress measure. 

DUBNER: Okay. 

MARK: On a scale of 1 to 10, Stephen, where 1 is not at all stressed, you’re in a Zen state, you’re just feeling really, really relaxed, and 10 is extremely stressed, you’re as wired as you can be, where do you fall right now?

DUBNER: Well, because I’m having a conversation with you, a substantial person, on microphones for the purpose of making a radio show, it’s not 0 or 1. I’m very comfortable speaking with you, and I’m in a setting that I’m very accustomed to, and comfortable with, my own studio, and I have my dog here. So I feel pretty unstressed, except for the fact that I’m about to try to do something that I know I’ll be bad at. So I would say probably 4 on a scale of 10.

MARK: Okay. So on a scale of 1 to 10 — 1 not at all stressed, 10 extremely stressed — you rate yourself a 4. 

DUBNER: That’s right. 

MARK: Okay. So, ready to begin?

Here’s how the experiment worked. Gloria Mark would read me a string of numbers and then I’d have to name the number that came three back from the end, not counting the final number. At the same time, the producer of this episode, Augusta Chapman, had arranged for another of our producers, Zack Lapinski, to text me about the logistics of an upcoming interview. They had told me about this texting ahead of time because it wouldn’t have worked otherwise; my colleagues know that I keep my phone on do-not-disturb pretty much always.

MARK: Okay. Let’s go. 6-4-7-7.

DUBNER: That would be 6.

MARK: 0-4.

DUBNER: Oops. I just got a text from Zack asking when a next interview is. I didn’t even hear you because I was so stressed out. Would you mind repeating them? 

MARK: Okay. I will start again. 0, 4, 6, 3.

DUBNER: That would be zero, but I had to stop doing what I was doing, which was looking up the date and time of the interview that Zack is asking me about. Can I just answer Zack over the microphone now, hoping that he’ll hear me? 

MARK: No, you have to do it through text. 

DUBNER: You people are so mean.

MARK: All right. Now we’re going to move a little faster here. 3-1-0-4. 

DUBNER: 3. 

MARK: 6-8-2-3. 

DUBNER: 6. 

MARK: 0-4-6-3.

DUBNER: 4.

MARK: 3, 1, 0, 4.

DUBNER: 6. 3. Cabbage. No idea.

MARK: 6-8-2-3.

DUBNER: Megalopolis.

MARK: 5-3-8-1. 8-8-2-5. You give up?

DUBNER: Oh, I so give up. And I also didn’t even answer the text that Zack sent me because I was so despondent.

MARK: Okay, so what’s your stress level on a scale of 1 to 10?

DUBNER: 19. I mean, no, it’s — stress. Well, does stress include despondence and despair? 

MARK:   Yeah. That’s part of the —

DUBNER: Yeah, it’s very high. I feel like my posture has slumped. And, you know, if my dog were a little closer, I might kick her, I feel so down. So, yeah, that was not a good experience, Gloria. Thanks. 

MARK: Well, I’m sorry, but, you know, we did want to demonstrate the pitfalls of multitasking.

DUBNER: You broke me. 

MARK: Yeah, I think it was a good demonstration. 

It was a good demonstration — and a humbling one. Although it did confirm my suspicion that I am terrible at multitasking. The good news — at least for me — is that nearly everyone else is also terrible. Nearly everyone else. There is a slim section of humankind whom David Strayer, the University of Utah researcher, has come to call supertaskers.

STRAYER: We didn’t believe they existed early on. So when we found the very first supertasker, I thought there must be something wrong. We must have actually miscoded the data.

This was in joint research with Jason M. Watson.

STRAYER: When I tell people about the supertasker research, I begin by saying, in a classroom of, say, 100, “How many of you think you’re good at multitasking? How many of you think you’re a supertasker?” Maybe half the class raises their hand. Then when we actually test them only about two, two-and-a-half percent are in that category.

Strayer and Watson discovered this when they had research subjects drive a car — or a car simulator — and then perform another cognitively demanding task. Usually, this made people worse at both driving and the new task. That’s because of the switch cost that Strayer and Gloria Mark mentioned earlier. But a few people got better when they took on a second task.

STRAYER: Our conventional thinking was that everyone was going to show this cost when you tried to multitask. Then we found one. And just watching what they could do was actually, I could hardly believe. It’s like, they would just make no errors. They would just be perfect. We subsequently have done a variety of things to try and understand that phenomena, looking at brain imaging, to try and understand what parts of the brain are acting differently in supertaskers. And we can find that there are clear neural signatures. Just recently, we had an online version where there’s about 10,000 people that were tested around the world. Yet again, we find about two-and-a-half percent of the population are in this category of being able to do two things at the same time without suffering the costs of multitasking. We had one person who took the test and got a perfect score. He then decided he’d replicate it again. He made one error, and so he was worried that somehow, maybe he really wasn’t a supertasker, and it’s like, that you even made one error is still like super-human. And he goes, “Oh, good, oh and by the way, I happen to be one of the best sight-readers for piano in the world.” Somebody else we tested was an Olympic athlete, who was competing in one of the Olympic games, so —

DUBNER: So are they, do you believe, genetic outliers, or is there a learned component of this? Because when you mention the person who is great at sight-reading, maybe they became great at sight-reading over time, and all kinds of effort and what Anders Ericsson used to call deliberate practice, and then somehow that translates into an ability to supertask. Or do you think the arrow is going in the other direction, that they had that ability ahead of time, and that made them perhaps a great sight-reader and a great supertasker?

STRAYER: That’s a really good question. The literature on skill acquisition says that the transfer gradients are relatively narrow, so I might be —

DUBNER: Uh-oh, “transfer gradients relatively narrow.” I need an English translation for that, please. 

STRAYER: That means just because I know how to ride a bicycle doesn’t mean that I know how to surf. What you learn is very, very specific to the task that you’ve learned. And if you learn and practice, practice, practice one thing, you can get really good at that. Switching the task just a little bit, and all of a sudden the rules change, and then you kind of go back to square one. So, there definitely are things where if we practice and practice and practice, we get very good at the very specific things we’ve been practicing. In the case of our supertaskers, these are tasks that they’ve never had a chance to see before, and they excel at those types of tasks. We think it’s something about the way their brain is organized. It may well be genetic, but it’s something that they come into the learning environment with, and it’s not something where they’re transferring from one activity to something else. We do know that there are changes in some of the areas of the brain, the frontal polar region, right at the very front of the prefrontal cortex, tends to be more efficient. So the brains are actually more efficient, processing information in a way that’s — well, superior. One of the things we’re trying to identify is, is there a, say, a gender difference? It doesn’t appear that there is. Are there other characteristics about work environments that they may just gravitate toward? Don’t have the answer to that, but it would make sense that, someone who’s really bad at multitasking, maybe they’re not going to be cut out for some jobs.

DUBNER: Now, I assume that the 97.5 or so percent of us who are not supertaskers, that we are on a spectrum of ability to multitask, yes?

STRAYER: There are some people who can’t walk and chew gum. They’re clearly at the other end, they’re anti-supertaskers.

DUBNER: And where would you put yourself on the spectrum?

STRAYER: If I knew, what I know about probability and statistics, at best, I’m probably right in the middle.

DUBNER: And how do you feel about that? Are you okay with that?

STRAYER: Yeah, I’m fine with that. Knowing that I have characteristics in terms of my attentional abilities that are consistent with the rest of the people who are wandering around on this planet, is reassuring.

DUBNER: But wouldn’t you kind of like to be able to recite the Iliad in Greek and drive a car and, you know, balance some modern version of a checkbook at the same time? Wouldn’t it be kind of cool? 

STRAYER: Yeah, I guess. I mean, when some of these supertaskers came in for the first time, and we had an opportunity to watch some of the performance they did, and it was otherworldly. It just was something beyond anything that I could possibly do. They have absolutely extraordinary ability to be able to process multiple streams of information, and do it successfully. 

DUBNER: If you could identify those differences that produce a multitasker, would you want to find a way, whether through technology or medicine or whatnot, to spread it around? In other words, would we on balance in society, benefit by having more supertasking?

STRAYER: I don’t know if that would be the direction I would be personally interested in. I’m more interested in just how our brains work, and how we think, and what it tells us about being human. And what it tells us about being human, for the most part, is that we’re bad at multitasking, even though we think we’re good at multitasking.

Okay, given what David Strayer just explained, about supertaskers and the rest of us — I have a question: does it seem like the world is increasingly asking the rest of to act as if we are supertaskers? Here, again, is Gloria Mark:

MARK: To be able to collaborate with other people or to participate as a good employee, you have to adopt the software, and you have to use it to some extent. You know, you have a different app for a different purpose, and that’s going to lead people to switch their attention. If you remember when Slack first came out — gosh, I hated Slack, and within a month, I was on 35 different Slack channels. Slack was designed to be a better solution than email. But as a result, it created all these separate threads that you had to keep track of and you kept getting notifications for each separate Slack channel. So I think Slack is a really good example of how companies are conspiring to have us switch attention.

DUBNER: Have you ever spoken with anyone at Slack to tell them how much you hate their software?

MARK: I have not.

Coming up: we speak with Slack.

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So far in this episode, we’ve heard from two researchers, Gloria Mark and David Strayer, who have evidence that the vast majority of us can’t really do two things at the same time, and when we try, we usually do worse at both. So, on average, multitasking leads to more mistakes, it leads to lower productivity, and it causes stress. Perhaps you are familiar with this type of stress. Perhaps you are familiar with Slack?

GRACE: Slack is a work-centric collaboration platform.

That is Olivia Grace. We heard from her earlier; she’s the one who tried to become an air traffic controller. Today, she is a senior product manager at Slack.

GRACE: Which basically means I make an awful lot of PowerPoint presentations. But what I would probably put on my LinkedIn is that I lead a team that builds various products across Slack with a focus on solving problems for people who are doing their jobs via the internet.

Slack lets you message coworkers, and hold group conversations on particular topics, and make audio and video calls. The company was founded in 2009, by Stewart Butterfield, and it was bought out by Salesforce, in 2021, for around $28 billion. Butterfield once claimed that Slack would replace email, but that hasn’t happened. Instead, employees at many firms, including the Freakonomics Radio Network, find themselves toggling back and forth all day between Slack and email — all while trying to find time for the other things they need to do. This has led some people to identify Slack as a key villain in today’s multitasking crisis. Here are some recent headlines: “How Slack Ruined Work,” from Wired magazine. “Slack Is the Right Tool for the Wrong Way to Work,” from The New Yorker. So I wanted to hear Olivia Grace’s views on multitasking, and I wondered if her views were perhaps influenced by that long-ago air traffic control exam.

GRACE: Yeah, I think it was very influential. I still think back to that when I think about things like video-calling systems at Slack. When we are asking someone to make a decision during a video call, they’re doing this real-time thing that requires active and constant participation — and we’re effectively being, like, “Oh, is the light red? Would you push the button?” I always say to my teams that work on those products, “Don’t do that. Unless it’s really urgent, and it’s like a decision you have to make that is going to influence that specific video call don’t ask people to do too many things at once, because they just can’t.”

DUBNER: So do you believe that multitasking is essentially a myth?

GRACE: I think that’s a statement that, knowing what I know today, I would agree with, yes.

DUBNER: Do you work in an office, face-to-face with at least some colleagues, or do you work remotely?

GRACE: I work mostly remotely.

DUBNER: Do you have a car? Do you drive much?

GRACE: I do have a car, I do drive.

DUBNER: And what else do you do besides driving, when you’re driving? Do you listen to music or podcasts? Do you talk on the phone? Or are you maybe on some Slack channels while you’re at the traffic light, etc.?

GRACE: Oh goodness me, no. I like to listen to music or listen to podcasts when I drive. But I will queue those up before I leave. I don’t like to touch screens too much while I’m driving, because I prefer my attention to be on the road.

DUBNER: You sound like such an advocate for the argument against multitasking. And yet you work at a company that a lot of people think is facilitating the belief in multitasking. Can you just walk me through that apparent paradox?

GRACE: Yeah, I think it’s a reasonable paradox to present. I think that for many people, work is this sort of ongoing prioritization exercise inherently of, like, “I’ve got to do this one big task. I’ve got to write this report. I’ve got to write this proposal. And maybe those things are the things that are exciting. And then you have this sort of ongoing barrage of like, thin tasks, like, oh, you know, “Stephen pinged me about this thing next Tuesday,” or “Oh, I need to approve this P.T.O request. I need to look over here at expense reports. I need to just get back to them on this.” And so I think, to me, it’s that prioritization exercise. And the thing which I feel, I wouldn’t say, like, goes as far as breaking down the paradox, but maybe helps to understand the paradox, is that I think that working in a system like Slack, we are uniquely positioned to help people with that prioritization.

DUBNER: And how do you do that?

GRACE: I’ll actually go back to one example I mentioned earlier of the video-calling product. We want people to be able to differentiate between something right now — it requires your attention, Stephen is calling you, pick up the phone, this is happening at this moment and it may not happen again. And so not only is that something which you need to be able to act on, we want to give you grace of saying “Be there in five minutes.” And that’s something which we really felt passionately about, adding in that flexibility for our users, and just kind of embracing the real-world version of it — like, “can you jump on a call?” isn’t a yes/no, red button/green button, binary choice. It’s like, “Oh yeah, just give me five minutes to wrap this up.” I will couch all of this in saying, I work at Slack, I use Slack, we live in Slack at Slack. And so I wouldn’t be surprised if your listeners said, “Oh, well, she would say that.”

DUBNER: So here’s a heretical question. Before Slack existed and before any similar software existed, one could argue that the earth was spinning okay, and people were getting work done and being productive, and people were doing big things like building nuclear reactors and writing books and so on, things that require deep attention. But then there are many different kinds of work, plainly, and there are also many different kinds of workers. So, you know, you want to give everybody tools that are going to make them optimize for themselves. But I do wonder with products like yours — and it’s not just yours, there are many — there is this notion called induced demand, the big example is, there is a road or a highway, there’s a lot of traffic on it, and the designers think, well, if we just widen it, and build more lanes, that will help ease demand. And in fact, usually when you do that, the traffic gets worse. There was a lot of demand in the beginning. And so now that there’s more capacity, there will be even more demand, and it gets even worse. So, from my perspective, I could say that firms like yours are inducing demand by creating more platforms for more communication, much of which may be useful, but much of which may be not useful. So if that’s the cynical or the outsider view of what your product could lead to, which is more activity that may accomplish a tertiary goal, but not the primary or even the secondary goal, how do you think about balancing that out?

GRACE: I think that the nature of communication and collaboration has, I think — I’m struggling with this myself as I think about it. If we think back to, you know, your example was building nuclear reactors — I think that the nature of that human collaboration has changed and it’s become more online, and there’s become different modes of communicating. So, you know, I don’t want to be facetious and talk about the telephone. Have you heard of it? But I think that as over time, the way that we communicate and the way that we inherently therefore collaborate has shifted — if we were doing this podcast in the ‘50s, maybe it would be those gosh-dang telephones ringing all the time when I’m just trying to, you know, write my punch card to drive this nuclear reactor.

I like the point Olivia Grace is making here. As the world grows more complex, our technology lets us respond to it in more complex ways — which, in turn, jacks up the intensity for other people. That feverish state you enter when you’re required to multitask beyond your ability? That is what economists would call a negative externality of the technology itself. You can put the blame for this on Slack, and all the others that constantly hijack our attention — but let’s be honest: we also need to blame ourselves. We buy what Slack is selling because even though it may not be good for us, even though it may not boost productivity, we seem to want to keep thinking that we are all supertaskers when in fact only 2.5 half percent of us are.

GRACE: I do think that collaboration systems do to some extent mirror the collaboration culture of the companies at which they are used. So if I think back to, for example, my time in gaming — we used Slack. The expectation of response there was very different than now, when I work at Slack. For example, we would work these very big gaming events, e-sports events, one called BlizzCon. And so when I was working BlizzCon, one of the things that I wasn’t a huge fan of was that my boss would D.M. me in Slack at 11 at night and then call me because I didn’t reply, because I was asleep. So that expectation of response is sort of like — would I mute my D.M.s from my boss? No. Absolutely not. There’s not a Slack feature that Slack can necessarily build to mitigate for how my boss at that company expected me to respond to them at 11 at night. Like there isn’t a sort of, “Block your boss.” Like, we could build that. Should we build that? I don’t know that we should.

I dunno. I think a “block your boss” feature is one of the first things I would have built if I worked at a place like Slack. Maybe that’s why I’ve never been asked to work at a place like Slack. I mean, I can barely hold down a job. I just do this, whatever it is we’re doing here. And even so, I often feel battered by the many things vying for my attention. I am guessing you feel the same way — whether you’re trying to do some deep work, or just trying to act more like a human when you’re around your family and friends and co-workers, rather than acting like a poor imitation of a computer. So I went back to Gloria Mark to see if she had any advice for us.

MARK: Yeah. So I think we need to think about solutions at the individual level, the organizational level, and the societal level.

I asked Mark how she works — when she’s writing up a research paper, for instance, does she turn off her phone, does she shut her email program?

MARK: I do not have my email shut. My phone is relatively close by. But before I check email or before I check my phone, I’ve developed this habit where I ask myself, why do I need to check my phone right now? Why do I need to check email? And usually in the past, it’s because I’m bored or because I’m procrastinating. Or I want to do something more fun and interesting. But if I ask myself that question, it causes me to reflect, and I can stop myself from doing it. This is a technique that I regard as meta-awareness, which is being aware of what you’re doing as it’s unfolding. There are so many behaviors we do when we’re on our devices that are just automatic. And when we can make these automatic actions less automatic and raise them to a conscious awareness, then we can become more intentional in our actions and we can form a plan. “I’m going to work to the end of this page,” or “I’m going to work 20 more minutes, and then I can reward myself.”

DUBNER: So, the notion of intentionality seems sensible, happens to resonate with me. On the other hand, firms and institutions that we are engaging with — let’s say it’s, you know, a piece of software, an online community — they have different intentions in mind. In fact, those software platforms are designed to make my participation and my almost addiction to them unintentional. So that I don’t even notice. So do you really think that an individual who promises intentionality to themselves really stands a chance? 

MARK: It’s an uphill battle, and I agree that algorithms are very powerful. But also becoming aware of the power of algorithms can make a difference. We’re in a complicated landscape every time we go on our devices. But it’s important for individuals to make this attempt. Another thing that individuals can do is practice forethought. Forethought is imagining your future self. Future self doesn’t have to be five years from now, it could be the end of the day, 7 p.m., and if I have this urge to, you know, I want to go on social media or go on the news or check my email, I come up with a visualization of where I want to be at 7:00, and do I want to see myself working on that deadline? No. I want to see myself feeling relaxed and fulfilled and rewarded. And the stronger the visualization is, the easier it is for us to stay on track. 

DUBNER: Okay. I love that. 

MARK: Another thing that we can do is — remember, attention is directed to what our goals are. And goals are very slippery. We can lose sight of our goals so quickly. There was an experiment I did with colleagues at Microsoft Research where a colleague of mine, Alex Williams, developed a software bot that would ask people at the beginning of each day two very simple questions. What do you want to accomplish today, and how do you want to feel today? So what’s your task goal? What’s your emotional goal? Asking those two questions to people brought their goals to mind, and helped keep them on track. But the bad news is that the goals slipped very quickly. So people need to keep reminding themselves of their goals, writing it on a Post-It note or, whatever it takes to remember what your goals are.

DUBNER: Excellent. Okay.

MARK: Another thing we can do is to make sure we take sufficient breaks. There is this idea that people have to push themselves to the limit and by pushing ourselves to the limit we’ll accomplish more. But we’re just getting our minds exhausted. If you search on the internet, you’ll see all kinds of sites that say, “How to focus nonstop” or “How to focus for 10 hours.” That’s the worst thing that we can do. And instead we have to think of our minds in the same way that we think about our bodies. We can’t lift weights all day without getting exhausted, and we can’t have our minds focused hard for long stretches because our minds get exhausted, too. So we need to take sufficient breaks. The best break of all is to go outside and to be in nature. Because we know from studies that nature can restore people and de-stress people. It’s a beautiful experience to spend some time in nature. And if you can’t, then move around, or find some kind of simple activity that’s calming for you. For some people, it’s knitting. One guy I spoke to had a ball that he would bounce on a screen that was very relaxing for him. Whatever it takes. 

DUBNER: So these are all individual solutions, yes?

MARK: Exactly. At an organizational level, organizations can institute a quiet time in their workday. And some companies have done that. Let’s say between 2 and 4 p.m., where people just can’t be interrupted. People are excused from answering any kind of electronic communications. And it’s a time that people know can be devoted to doing some serious work.

DUBNER: Okay. What else can happen at the organization level?

MARK: Well, you should read email in batches. You do it at the beginning of the day, maybe you do it after lunch, and at the end of the day. Organizations can just send out emails, you know, three times during the day. This can reset people’s expectations. It can help rewire habits. You know, instead of checking emails 77 times a day, they just know they have to check it three times.

DUBNER: Okay, good. Anything else on the organization level? 

MARK: I think we can move to the societal level. 

DUBNER: Great. What do you have? 

MARK: Are you familiar with right-to-disconnect laws? 

DUBNER: Oh, I’ve read that phrase and salivated at it, but I don’t really know how they work.

MARK: Right-to-disconnect laws are laws that do not punish people who do not answer electronic, work-related communications after scheduled work hours.  France came up with the El Khomri labor law. Ireland came up with what’s called the code of practice. The Canadian province of Ontario is quite advanced. They came up with the Working for Workers Act of 2021. Now, there was a study in France to see how well these laws worked, and it’s actually a mixed bag. In theory, it sounds really great, but a lot of companies just haven’t followed these laws. 

DUBNER: It also sounds like it may be a little bit hard to have both right-to-disconnect laws and quiet time, and/or only three tranches of emails a day, because if there’s the right-to-disconnect law, won’t firms just try to cram more into the hours that are official work hours? 

MARK: Possibly. Or they could just reduce the amount of email that’s being sent, which would probably be the best solution of all.

DUBNER: So right-to-disconnect laws are a regulatory or legal move. What else do you have, society-wise?

MARK: So I’m thinking of young people, and children in particular. You know, there are media literacy programs that teach children how to use Google, but media literacy can be much broader. In terms of teaching people how to focus better, and teaching them about algorithms and the potential harms of algorithms. For that matter, teaching young people about misinformation and how to be aware and look at signals of misinformation. And it also means putting a limit on screen time. And, of course, this leads us to parents being role models for their kids, because children follow what their parents do. If your child is near you, don’t be on a screen. Give your attention to your child. I think it’s really important to teach young people at a very young age how they have a healthy relationship with technology.

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One more thing: Helen Fisher, who was for years one of my favorite scientists, and a good friend, recently died, at age 79. Helen was a scholar of romantic love and was herself one of the loveliest people I’ve ever known. She really enjoyed talking about her own work, and others’ work too, always with a wide-open spirit of joy. Her husband John Tierney wrote that toward the end, Helen was too fatigued for phone calls or visits — but that she had “somehow heroically finished her book and turned in the manuscript” to the publisher. Talk about keeping your focus on the deep work! Helen then said: “My work is done. I’ve had a magical life and accomplished more than I ever expected. I’m ready to die.” I’d like to dedicate this episode to Helen Fisher; you can hear her in episode 511 of Freakonomics Radio, “Why Did You Marry That Person?” We’ll be back next week with a new episode. Until then, take care of yourself and, if you can, someone else too.

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Augusta Chapman, with help from Zack Lapinski and Theo Jacobs. Our staff also includes Alina Kulman, Dalvin Aboagye, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmin Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, Jon Schnaars, Julie Kanfer, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levey, Neal Carruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, and Sarah Lilley. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; our composer is Luis Guerra.