[HN Gopher] Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage t...
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Multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain (2018)
Author : tracyhenry
Score : 183 points
Date : 2021-05-04 19:56 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.linkedin.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.linkedin.com)
| 5tefan wrote:
| So what to do now with that? It is the total opposite of "modern"
| work environments. Can't escape multitasking or can I?
| [deleted]
| gautamdivgi wrote:
| I'd vote to have no notifications (of any kind) from chat &
| messaging tools as the default. This too especially at work to
| reduce overload of multi-tasking. Even showing the number of
| messages on an icon in the taskbar is very distracting.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| The downside of no notifications is that you must manually
| check for changes
| etxm wrote:
| I got on this train when I got my first iPhone. I turned off
| every notification except the ringer (no one calls me except
| free cruise spam, so maybe I should silence that).
|
| At work, I disable all Slack messages and check Slack in my
| slack time. Email gets checked at 9AM and 4:30P.
|
| It's glorious.
| periheli0n wrote:
| Sounds glorious indeed! But what do you do when you need to
| send an email at 11:30? Do you send without looking? Or do
| you just wait until the next send window?
|
| I'm genuinely interested in this because by far the most
| time-intensive distractor in my job is answering email. When
| I look at email at 9am I am usually busy replying until 10 at
| least. Then I get some work done which I need to send off by
| email at 11:30, seeing that I have 20 new emails of which 10
| are somewhat relevant and 1 needs a reply.
| [deleted]
| refactor_master wrote:
| Again and again, people just refuse to accept that cognitive
| performance has very clear limits, and that multitasking, skipped
| breaks and long hours are, at best, a total waste of time. And
| exponentially so, the more "focus-intensive" the work is.
|
| Why do we have this bias? Is it deeply wired in some sort of
| survival instinct?
| amelius wrote:
| > Why do we have this bias? Is it deeply wired in some sort of
| survival instinct?
|
| Dualism. Body is physical, mind is spiritual. Therefore, mind
| cannot fail.
|
| Or some reasoning along those lines.
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| Puritanism?
| slver wrote:
| We evolve by trying to be better at what is needed of us to
| adapt. So yes, it's literally wired in as some sort of survival
| instinct.
|
| And technically, if we keep struggling at it, over time
| (generations) we'll get better at it.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Do people actually refuse to accept this? Are you sure they're
| not just doing something for a short-term benefit at the
| expense of long-term benefits? I don't refuse to accept that
| pulling an all-nighter is bad for my health and my efficiency,
| I just waited too long for a deadline and need to get stuff
| done by the morning. Likewise, I don't refuse to accept that a
| healthy diet is crucial to my health and wellbeing, I just
| really wanted some ice cream.
| neurobashing wrote:
| it seems to me to be the white-collar version of the blue-
| collar "I have 14 jobs to stay afloat" thing, some sort of
| weird awfulness that a certain group has spun into a sign of
| moral goodness. Look how great things are, they work 3 jobs to
| pay the bills! Well, we only usually work 1 job, and we get
| paid a _lot_ , so it's been spun until "look how many tasks
| they take on a day, aren't they great?".
| loopz wrote:
| If only work was organized to avoid multitasking.
| rajin444 wrote:
| I imagine it's a mix of:
|
| a) people are different. some people can grind more than others
|
| b) passion makes the grind easy. people passionate about a
| project can go harder longer, but expecting everyone to be
| passionate about their job is not healthy. this passion may
| appear or disappear depending on your task
|
| As to how to fix it I have no clue. That's hard.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I think what you say is true over the long term, but not so
| much over the short term. Need me to skip breaks and work hours
| for one day when I'm well rested. I definitely can be
| significantly more productive than usual. Problem is that it's
| not sustainable.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| "Never work overtime longer than one week in a row" - one of
| Extreme Programming's tenets.
| 0xFACEFEED wrote:
| It took me over 15 years in the industry to realize a couple
| of things. If you're young and reading this then I hope you
| at least spend a few minutes thinking deeply about it.
|
| 1) Any productivity gained over that one-or-two-day session
| makes very little difference in the big picture. Even a week.
|
| A company/product/feature is never going to live or die on
| that 30 hours of coding that you managed to squeeze into 48
| hours. 99.999% of the time you're doing it to calm people's
| nerves or make someone (yourself? PM? EM?) look good.
|
| 2) My reasons for doing these marathon sessions was a lie.
|
| I told myself that I'm doing it because I love the product,
| love the work, love this, love that. I'm an artisan, I told
| myself. A professional. Work is my life. Isn't it the same
| for those Japanese knife maker guys? I'm like those guys. I
| live this work.
|
| The real reason was fear. Fear of not being the best, fear of
| not being successful, etc. I felt like I didn't have a place
| among MIT/Stanford grads. So I compensated with brute force.
|
| --
|
| It didn't help that I was rewarded with more money, more
| respect, and more decision making power. I was even rewarded
| with more knowledge than everyone else -- you learn a lot
| working 12 hours a day. And if you screw something up you
| have plenty of time to fix it.
|
| Wrote a nasty bug? No problem, ship a fix at 11:30pm and the
| impact is minimal. People are much less likely to criticize
| you if you're the person sitting up at 11:30pm shipping to
| production. Clearly your heart is in the right place, right?
|
| The "trick", I found, was to work for people who NEVER EVER
| demanded more than 7 hours a day from me BUT also appreciated
| that I'd go well above and beyond expectations. Now that I
| think about it, it reminds of drug dealing (or the little I
| know about it from when I was a teen).
|
| I feel fortunate that I was able to disassociate my fear of
| failure from my genuine love for the work. These days I'm
| able to be very productive and lead a relatively healthy life
| but it took waaaay too long for me to figure out how.
| ajfjrbfbf wrote:
| > It didn't help that I was rewarded with more money, more
| respect, and more decision making power. I was even
| rewarded with more knowledge than everyone else -- you
| learn a lot working 12 hours a day. And if you screw
| something up you have plenty of time to fix it.
|
| As an intern this feels like everything I want though. More
| money, more respect, more decision making power, and most
| importantly, more knowledge. Fortunately my job is done
| after 4 months no matter what.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I understand the premise of what you're saying, but I also
| feel like you're downplaying the upside:
|
| > _It didn 't help that I was rewarded with more money,
| more respect, and more decision making power. I was even
| rewarded with more knowledge than everyone else -- you
| learn a lot working 12 hours a day. And if you screw
| something up you have plenty of time to fix it_
| 0xFACEFEED wrote:
| This is true.
|
| I was only able to reflect on these things after "making
| it". I feel comfortable financially and confident that
| I'll get work for the rest of my life, if I need it.
|
| There was a cost though. Like a greek tragedy of sorts.
|
| It cost me my health. I don't get to enjoy the spoils of
| "victory" as much as I would have when I felt healthy.
| Health is now a factor to consider daily and, in my case,
| it's directly attributed to the insane amount of myself
| that I put into the work.
|
| Another cost was missing out on precious time with my
| wife and child. That one really sucks. No undoing that
| one.
| 01100011 wrote:
| > A company/product/feature is never going to live or die
| on that 30 hours of coding that you managed to squeeze into
| 48 hours.
|
| Sort of.
|
| Several 'death marches' over my career were in fact
| necessary for business reasons. Large penalties can exist
| in contracts when deadlines are not met. No one is going to
| reschedule CES, the Christmas shopping season, or the
| Superbowl for you because you were running behind. In some
| cases, missing a deadline throws off the schedule of
| hundreds or thousands of people in your organization who
| depend on your work. It's true that many times it doesn't
| matter, but many times it does absolutely matter. I'd like
| to think I got to where I am in my career because I'm
| willing to put in the effort to make those sorts of
| deadlines.
|
| > My reasons for doing these marathon sessions was a lie.
|
| My reason for doing it is because it's the job. I came into
| engineering with the expectation that it is an important
| job that often demands much of you but also affords you
| with a great deal of flexibility and self-determination. I
| get to take off time whenever I want and WFH whenever I
| want because I accept that there will be times when I
| absolutely cannot do whatever I want.
|
| It depends on the specifics of your job as well. Some indie
| game dev can probably just delay their release a few days.
| Embedded devs are often on a schedule dictated by hardware
| schedules, production schedules, factory availability,
| shipping time, etc. etc. Just because the job is software
| doesn't mean it has to resemble any other software job.
| outworlder wrote:
| > Large penalties can exist in contracts when deadlines
| are not met.
|
| If you are cutting it so close that an extra few hours
| are the difference between delivering or not, _ the
| project has been a failure for quite a while _
|
| Some things cannot be easily foreseen and you have to
| fight some fires. That's fine. But let's not normalize
| lack of planning.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| I don't work in coding but as sysadmin. And the same
| stuff applies.
|
| Projects with multimillion dollar outcomes are somehow
| managed by people who don't stoop to ask your team
| anything in the planning phase.
|
| Instead they come in the implementation phase and want
| you to jump. Then you point out the resources required -
| in writing - and the fires are burning...
|
| At that point, I may help or may not depending on whether
| they pay good overtime and it suits me.
| 0xFACEFEED wrote:
| > Several 'death marches' over my career were in fact
| necessary for business reasons. Large penalties can exist
| in contracts when deadlines are not met.
|
| This is why management should be setting internal
| deadlines LONG before the actual deadlines. If they fail
| to do this, it's their fault, not yours (as the
| engineer).
|
| If you play up to their illusions of success by telling
| them "it'll be fine, we can do it" (I've done this -- a
| lot) then of course they'll go along because you'll be
| the one to blame when the deadline isn't met.
|
| Setting yourself up as the one to blame for promises
| outside of your control is a very, very bad thing to do.
|
| > No one is going to reschedule CES, the Christmas
| shopping season, or the Superbowl for you because you
| were running behind.
|
| This is WRONG. Of course they reschedule things for CES.
| If a product isn't ready in time for some event, the
| company WILL find a way to deal with it.
|
| This is what took me a very long time to learn.
|
| Nobody cares about CES. Not in the big scheme of things.
|
| > I get to take off time whenever I want and WFH whenever
| I want because I accept that there will be times when I
| absolutely cannot do whatever I want.
|
| Taking a couple weeks off is nothing. Tell me a story
| about how you take off a couple weeks every 3 months --
| you don't. Because, in order to meet the "demand" you
| speak of, you're not actually going to use those times
| off.
|
| There are something like 104 weekend days in the year.
| Now combine that with non-work hours there are in a year.
| Now add a standard amount of vacation days per year in
| tech companies (like 4-6 weeks?). That's how much time
| you're giving up by working nights and weekends.
|
| > Embedded devs are often on a schedule dictated by
| hardware schedules, production schedules, factory
| availability, shipping time, etc. etc. Just because the
| job is software doesn't mean it has to resemble any other
| software job.
|
| But it isn't the responsibility of the hardware developer
| to ensure timelines are appropriately padded.
|
| The reality is, and this is especially true in hardware,
| non-software related delays happen all the time. It needs
| to be accounted for either way.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I learned from my parents. They both worked as software
| developers - which, come to think of it, I think is
| somewhat rare considering I'm 42.
|
| One kept burning the midnight oil. The other had enough of
| it and refused to work more than 8 hours per day. Neither
| seemed to be particularly rewarded or punished for it. Told
| myself I would never work from 7am to midnight. I guess I
| liked having a 2nd dinner at 1am though.
|
| I don't stress the hours. If I genuinely want to get
| something done, I'll work extra hours. If not, I won't. I
| tend to track my hours for my own information and seem to
| average around 39 per week.
|
| To be clear, this wasn't my "I made it" attitude, I
| developed this from watching my parents. That said, after
| all this time in the industry I don't have to really worry
| about money or a job. I can't retire today but my eventual
| retirement (if that is something I actually want to do) is
| paid for.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| It's interesting to read so many comments against marathon
| sessions.
|
| I can't imagine reading the same set of comments 20 years
| ago (when I was young and a frequent marathoner, as were my
| teammates).
|
| Is this indicative of a cultural shift in the industry?
|
| Or collective learning?
|
| Or might it just be that no 20 somethings are commenting
| here and it's just a sample bias resulting from older
| commentators?
|
| Do 20 something developers today feel that marathoning is a
| wasted effort, or do they tend to think it is the best way
| to get things done?
|
| BTW I think I would agree with the comments now, but even
| 10 years ago I might have been dismissive.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| I suspect more people:
|
| - see the rich vs poor divide
|
| - see what it took for the rich to get there. And it
| isn't just "hard work".
|
| Plenty of people work hard at all levels of life. But the
| "hard work as a virtue" meme is dying.
| 0xFACEFEED wrote:
| > Is this indicative of a cultural shift in the industry?
|
| Yes I think the industry is changing.
|
| In my anecdotal experience, the quality of programmers
| has taken a nose dive. I think part of the reason is that
| it's been a lucrative industry for long enough that
| parents have had time to coach their children into the
| industry.
|
| In the early-mid 2000s (when I cut my teeth) and
| especially in the 80s/90s (from what I hear) you came
| across more "hacker" types that were doing this work for
| the love of doing it. Yea you still had the "Initech"
| type companies that would outsource/etc but cutting edge
| programming work was a lot easier to find.
|
| These days I'm seeing more and more people that treat
| programming as a "job", not a "passion".
|
| Obviously I think this is a good thing for people, in
| general.
|
| But I also think that, while the potential for software
| is at its highest, the actual relative quality of
| software is at its absolute lowest. This is due in large
| part to the bad quality of software engineering these
| days. Again, very anecdotal.
| nefitty wrote:
| This "Type-A" hustle mentality resonates with me. I do
| see lots of people pushing back on it, ie ridiculing JD's
| that mention passion, emphasizing work-life balance,
| disdain for "brogrammer" culture, etc. This seems
| especially prevalent on Twitter.
|
| My personal life doesn't allow me to do marathons. If I
| was single I would probably be hauling ass all day every
| day. I understand the health implications, but the desire
| to be "the best" or to be "10x" clouds my long-term
| vision.
|
| I want to dominate like rms, Carmack, Beej, Eich, etc.
| That might put some people off, but technically, those
| same critics are my competition. If you don't want to put
| in the same hours as me, that's cool, but there aren't an
| infinite amount of $200k+ roles in the world.
| 0xFACEFEED wrote:
| I've always thought of brute force work (like marathons)
| as compensation for not being as gifted as rms, Carmack,
| etc.
| curiousllama wrote:
| I really like #1. There's a good quote I've been focusing
| on recently - "people tend to overestimate what they can
| accomplish in a day, and underestimate what they can
| accomplish in a year."
| godot wrote:
| I will preface this by saying I agree with you.
|
| However, I'd like to point out (as someone else did too
| about downplaying the upside) -- if you did get rewarded
| with money, respect, promotions (decision making power),
| knowledge -- these are all real material gains from those
| long hours. True, from the business point of view, your
| extra hours didn't matter to the business in the long run.
| It did matter for your career though. In fact, if you
| happened to work for a growing unicorn, and you gained
| those rewards and promotions with those long hours, you may
| even have made lifechanging money from unicorn equity, from
| those long hours.
|
| Which, comes back to the point, this is unhealthy and
| somewhat toxic (the fact that putting in long hours gain
| you those things, i.e. it encourages people to do so).
| 0xFACEFEED wrote:
| > In fact, if you happened to work for a growing unicorn,
| and you gained those rewards and promotions with those
| long hours, you may even have made lifechanging money
| from unicorn equity, from those long hours.
|
| That's what happened to me. Unicorn -> long hours -> pay
| day.
|
| > Which, comes back to the point, this is unhealthy and
| somewhat toxic
|
| This is the unfortunate conclusion that I've come to as
| well.
|
| High risk, high reward. There are people who work just as
| hard and for just as long, but don't get to enjoy the
| spoils. When I think of how close I came to not making it
| -- eek.
| cgrealy wrote:
| This. So much this.
|
| At my company, we give out "values awards". People are
| frequently lauded for working late evenings and weekends.
| Everytime this happens, I cringe. If people feel they
| _need_ to do this, it 's a sign that projects were under-
| resourced or the deadlines were too tight.
|
| At this point in my career, I am so much more comfortable
| saying "no" to upper management.
|
| "My team does not have capacity for this" "ok, which piece
| of work do you want us to drop?" "Yep, we can do that...
| next year"
| 0xFACEFEED wrote:
| > At this point in my career, I am so much more
| comfortable saying "no" to upper management.
|
| Me too. But I also don't care about career progression or
| money anymore. 10 years ago that wasn't the case.
| belval wrote:
| Thank you for taking the time to write this, I got a job at
| FANG right out of college and the impostor syndrome is real
| so I have compensated with a lot of extra work.
| Unfortunately the truth is at this scale my contribution
| makes little difference and the extra hours even less so. I
| just end up burning myself out over nothing.
| [deleted]
| 0xFACEFEED wrote:
| > the impostor syndrome is real
|
| Take this with a grain of salt, but I've found myself
| happiest working for small companies with people that I
| like being around. The list of reasons why is quite long
| (I can elaborate if you like), but the only unfortunate
| downside is you make a lot less money. You do have a
| chance of winning big in the acquisition lottery though.
| JimBlackwood wrote:
| As a young person who works parttime as data-analist next
| to my studies;
|
| I feel what you're describing is part of growing older and
| being in a different phase of life. What you mentioned is
| something that I have read more often. I feel that the only
| way for me to appreciate work like you do, is to currently
| work more than might be healthy. As wrong as that might
| seem, it seems very right to me.
|
| For instance, with my 16-hours/week I dont get done what I
| want. I'm sure it doesn't matter in the long term, but
| there's so many cool projects to do. I would love to be
| allowed to work in the evening to finish some cool stuff. I
| genuinely feel better after that. I expect to feel
| different about this after 15 years in the industry.
|
| Maybe that's just how we learn, maybe it's societal
| expectations that we try to live up to and stop caring
| about when we're older.
| Graffur wrote:
| Can you describe your current job and company?
| 0xFACEFEED wrote:
| No, but if you have a less open ended question then I'm
| happy to answer.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| I consider myself fairly lucky to have landed a job at a
| place that figured this out right out of school.
|
| The unhealthy behavior on my part is comparing myself to my
| friends who went to the Bay and make basically the same
| salary but get like $100k in RSUs per year on top of it, or
| those who have the mental endurance to juggle a FAANG job
| and fairly lucrative contract work on the side.
|
| Even though the numbers are attractive, I enjoy having the
| time to have a life on the side. I don't really like the
| concept of "work is life" that the big bay area tech
| companies seem to have. Not exactly doing much with it
| right now, but I could if I wanted to...
| wildrhythms wrote:
| 100% my experience. Burnout is never worth it.
| dkersten wrote:
| Great post. It reminded me of something I experienced in a
| previous job:
|
| One of my coworkers worked a lot of overtime at one point,
| I think he liked to feel like the hero. In order to make
| sure a particular project was delivered in time.
|
| Guess what happened? The client just randomly pushed the
| deadline back a few months making all the overtime
| unnecessary.
|
| I know you can't know if this will happen ahead of time,
| but it still reminded me that you can put in all the effort
| in the world and not get anything for it. Personally, I
| will do my absolute best within the confines of my
| contract, and no more. I might do some occasional overtime
| if it's needed, but I expect my employer to return the
| favour when I need some time off or flexibility.
|
| I've had too many health issues from my past bad work
| practices (it's hard to have good work practices when doing
| your own startups...) to do any more than that. Hell im
| being treated for high blood pressure right now...
| 0xFACEFEED wrote:
| > Guess what happened? The client just randomly pushed
| the deadline back a few months making all the overtime
| unnecessary.
|
| Sounds familiar.
|
| I'd push hard to reach a deadline only to see the
| deadline get pushed back because other, more sensible
| people, were not bending over backwards for the company.
| These are other sensible people could be folks on other
| teams (eg: marketing), business partners (eg: launch
| partners), or even customers.
|
| > I've had too many health issues from my past bad work
| practices (it's hard to have good work practices when
| doing your own startups...) to do any more than that.
| Hell im being treated for high blood pressure right
| now...
|
| I feel you. It's impacted my health as well. I think
| permanently.
|
| I'm fortunate enough to have built up a financial war
| chest so that I can relax now, but boooy was I close to
| not having made it.
| periheli0n wrote:
| That's the trap. I can pull off 16-hour days once in a while.
| They problem is that once I knew I can do that I tended to
| factor them into my planning, instead of treating them as the
| absolute exception that is actually harmful to my health.
| Taek wrote:
| Most coders I know have had occasional run ins with a rabbit
| hole where several days of their life got sucked into a
| single drawn out coding session with little breaks besides
| food, and had some of the most productive few days of their
| lives doing that.
|
| If you need me to do a three day sprint, I'm going to
| accomplish the most without any breaks and with very sporadic
| sleep. (typically when doing a multi day session my sleep
| happens 30-120 minutes at a time, usually immediately
| following me hitting a difficult problem that requires
| intense rumination)
| athenot wrote:
| I would much rather code for 3 days non stop and then take
| a 4 day break doing some outdoors activity. I think the
| "business hours" schedule is fantastic for meetings to
| discuss but terrible for creative work.
|
| The catch is than in many positions, one needs to blend
| these 2 modes of operation. Some collaboration, some deep
| work. Unless there's support throughout the organization,
| what ends up suffering is the deep work.
| periheli0n wrote:
| The problem is also that meetings and answering emails is
| much easier than deep work and therefore they are highly
| attractive procrastination pastimes.
| yonaguska wrote:
| Ugh. I find them incredibly draining. While if I can
| actually code for a few hours uninterrupted (this
| includes self interruption), I find I have so much more
| energy. Maybe it's the self congratulatory mind
| manipulation I play on myself when I'm productive. On the
| other hand, meetings that I have little stake in just
| exhaust me and derail my ability to focus for the entire
| day. This may be an ADHD thing though.
| dkarras wrote:
| To me: If I'm behind schedule in important work, obsessed with
| a problem etc. NOT engaging with work feels a lot worse than
| working on it in reduced capacity. If I take a break, call it a
| day etc. my mind keeps working on it, I feel anxious etc.
| Working on the problem though, feels just fine. I'm just tired,
| but probably having fun.
|
| Also the "gambler" instinct is there. I have solved hairy
| problems when I'm tired (because when you are out of ideas, you
| tend to consider creative options) though it is rare. But you
| seek the "rush" of solving it, finishing something that will
| give you a "high" for hours after you leave the desk.
| icelancer wrote:
| >> Again and again, people just refuse to accept that cognitive
| performance has very clear limits, and that multitasking,
| skipped breaks and long hours are, at best, a total waste of
| time
|
| These studies are non-ergodic. I work best under long hours;
| have tried both. The real proof in the pudding is the fact that
| many of my competitors work "efficient" work weeks and get
| buried under the onslaught of hours I work.
|
| For surgical things like programming and software development,
| I'll readily admit that working 80 hours/week is not ideal. But
| for management and a wide-ranging entrepreneur, I strongly
| suspect the opposite is true.
| eloff wrote:
| Maybe, but if you're running a company you basically are
| doing highly leveraged decisions. Making more decisions is
| not nearly as important as making the right ones - and being
| overworked is not conducive to that.
|
| Getting your sleep, eating well, exercising, seems more
| important.
| nzmsv wrote:
| Because people with money don't care how many humans they burn
| through while building their empire. In the short term there
| are productivity improvements to be had, and long term the
| burned out components of the big machine just get replaced.
|
| Cue the counterpoints of "I love to hustle". Sure you do, until
| you come down with burnout, a mental health issue, failed
| relationship, etc.
| elmomle wrote:
| From what I've seen, multitasking tends to inversely correlate
| with how secure a person feels in their life. Multitasking
| seems to be driven (for me and those I've spoken to) by a sense
| that one needs to "catch up" or "get ahead". Dig a bit deeper
| and implicit beneath that is the feeling, "things aren't OK
| just as they are".
| mrkstu wrote:
| Probably because work culture was originally not
| knowledge/cognitive based, and the expectations were based on
| human endurance of physical expenditure, which has different
| load bearing characteristics.
| laurent92 wrote:
| I'd rather say: On passion. Since I'm 13, I've always
| programmed in long stretches, by passion. It's please to
| absorbe oneself into a problem and solve it. Not saying it's
| healthy, just saying it's rooted in our human form, not in
| workplace traditions.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Do you find it's easy for you to head back into work at 9
| am the next day? I'll have boughts, but they leave me
| drained and needing to recharge. I can't do it
| consistently, especially if the work isn't exciting.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| This is why set works hours for jobs that require more
| cognitive skills are silly. My brain is shot about after lunch
| until about 3-4pm and yet I'm forced to sit around and pretend
| to be productive. Yeah there are occasionally some low end
| tasks that could be done in that period but I'd be better off
| just taking a nap and zoning out.
| pizza wrote:
| We love to hustle
| vmception wrote:
| People look down on the pursuit of money but appreciate the
| outcome
|
| For the person that decides to efficiently pursue money at a
| higher velocity, the sooner they finish it the sooner they
| can recreate their social circle with new people that only
| see the outcome
|
| I'm still around people that talk about gentrification and
| inequality, just from my penthouse apartment where they've
| mentally exempted me from being the very person they talk
| about
| bitL wrote:
| > Why do we have this bias?
|
| It's about the control in hierarchy. The more one is flooded
| with streams of work, the lower is the chance of threatening
| somebody or leaving for greener pastures (leaving to worse ones
| is more likely for an exhausted person).
| bobthechef wrote:
| I really dislike reaching for these sorts of evolutionary
| "explanations". They're typically unconvincing ad hoc just-so
| stories with no real attempt at systematically establishing the
| truth of the various mutually contradictory claims.
| Evolutionary psychology is notorious in this regard.
|
| Instead, I will only add that distractability is emotional and
| moral in nature. When I feel uncomfortable, I will be tempted
| to switch to something else to relieve the discomfort. The
| inability to engage in self-denial is one reason for indulging
| the temptation (which is why fasting and abstinence are great
| ways to engage in self-denial and strengthen one's self-
| mastery; you can always spot a person's weakness by the
| passions they overindulge and which seem to control them).
| Historically, this inability to do without pleasure was called
| effeminacy and the inability to bear discomfort was called
| delicacy (the Greek malakia has been translated into either, I
| think). Sustained focus is toil and toil is uncomfortable and
| requires both enduring discomfort and relinquishing pleasure.
|
| Another reason may be related to mental health. Distractions
| and diversions become especially attractive when under duress.
| ratherbefuddled wrote:
| > multitasking, skipped breaks and long hours
|
| From personal experience I think these are two very different
| things.
|
| Context switching seems to me to have a cost directly
| proportional to the complexity of the task. If it takes me 10
| minutes to get the mental model of something sorted and then
| I'm interrupted I'll lose most of that 10 minutes. I can fire
| off emails requiring little thought one after the other with
| little cost.
|
| I find that working long hours/without breaks is completely
| trainable. I can do it productively for long lengths of time
| and the longer I do it the easier it gets. It's very tiring,
| and requires solid rest in between but it can be done and it
| can be very productive.
|
| The intersection of the two is impossible for me. Interruptions
| seem to accelerate the slowly building fatigue markedly. It's
| as though almost all the effort goes into getting the mental
| model sorted and staying there is relatively cheap.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > I can fire off emails requiring little thought one after
| the other with little cost.
|
| So can everyone else, which results in the state of the
| average modern inbox.
| ratherbefuddled wrote:
| Yes, it's a sorry state of affairs. I'd escaped that sort
| of thing until recently when we started working with a
| client who behaves as though everybody lives in their inbox
| and sees emails seconds after they're sent. Explaining to
| them that I look maybe twice a day at emails was
| interesting.
|
| Slack is my problem. I'm trying to train myself to be
| disciplined but too many people treat it as synchronous.
| RobertoG wrote:
| It's just that, from a evolutionary standpoint, the kind of
| work that we do nowadays, is totally unnatural.
|
| So it's not strange that we have chaotic behaviors.
| throwaway823882 wrote:
| Which bias, the bias to want to multi-task? It's not a bias,
| we're just stupid. We think we can do multiple things at once.
| And we _can_ do multiple things at once, so our stupid brains
| have proof that we _can_ multitask.
|
| The problem is that humans can't objectively qualify their own
| results without analysis, and we don't _do_ rigorous scientific
| analysis on ourselves regularly, so we have no idea when
| something we do is shit or not. The only facility we have for
| that is comparison and pattern recognition, which is not
| rigorous analysis. If you don 't go out of your way to compare
| your results as a multi-tasker to the cumulative qualitative
| results of somebody else doing two different things, you will
| never see that multi-tasking is worse.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Ever since I learned that a lot of the standards for medical
| schedules, long work hours etc were set by a cocaine addict who
| believed it was natural to pull long hours
| (https://historydaily.org/cocaine-and-modern-medicine-a-
| twist...) it's really stuck with me.
|
| So many bad practices basically persist due to inertia and we
| all suffer for it.
| phobosanomaly wrote:
| Medical errors kill around a quarter-million people a year.
| Third-leading cause of death.
|
| _Anderson JG, Abrahamson K. Your Health Care May Kill You:
| Medical Errors. Stud Health Technol Inform. 2017;234:13-17.
| PMID: 28186008.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28186008/_
|
| Medical residents are _capped_ at 80 hours per-week making
| around $50k /year, and this is sold as some sort of
| breakthrough over the previous system where they were working
| well-in-excess of those 80/week for _years_ during their
| residency.
|
| What is normalized in the healthcare system is beyond insane.
| m1117 wrote:
| It's better to single task on a multi-task assignment than multi-
| task on a single-task assignment.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| People don't multitask so much as task switch.
| danboarder wrote:
| Multitasking gets a bad rap but I would suggest that not
| everything we call "multitasking" disrupts focus. For example,
| many tasks become background processes and some provide rhythm
| for improved focus. In my experience, for example, listening to a
| Lex Fridman podcast while doing Photoshop design works great
| together and I think is better when done together than not,
| perhaps using different parts of the brain. Likewise, listening
| to music while coding are complementary tasks for me. So some
| tasks multitask together with others fine and improve focus,
| while others interrupt or disrupt focus, in my experience.
| slver wrote:
| Yup. The key is to find combinations of activities that don't
| conflict with each other.
|
| I also can work and breathe at the same time (neat trick). /s
| Rimpinths wrote:
| Right. I love to listen to music while coding, but I couldn't
| listen to a podcast. I've tried, but I can't write words and
| listen to words at the same time. But music is no problem.
| vladmk wrote:
| Read this while multitasking too smh gotta stop
| lostmsu wrote:
| This is total crap. TL;DR;
|
| 1. When doing multiple things at once performance is reduced in
| each of those things (thank you capt. Obvious).
|
| 2. Doing multiple things at once in a specific setting correlates
| with reduced activity in some brain areas. Casuality not
| demonstrated either way. No demonstrated relationship between
| "brain damage" and lower activity, so the claim in the title is
| at least two logical errors away from the raw data.
|
| 3. Buy this new book about EQ (which is pseudoscientific crap on
| its own).
| saagarjha wrote:
| > So the next time you're writing your boss an email during a
| meeting, remember that your cognitive capacity is being
| diminished to the point that you might as well let an 8-year-old
| write it for you.
|
| Yeah, no. Stick to the paper and stop trying to sensationalize
| it, please.
| curiousllama wrote:
| Joke's on them I never focused in on the meeting
| LZ_Khan wrote:
| Genuine question then.. how are we supposed to function properly
| as software engineers, especially in jobs with long feedback
| loops?
|
| The nature of my job is that I'm almost more of a train conductor
| than a software engineer. I configure a job, run it, then wait
| for 10-30 minutes to get the results. I do this for maybe 5 jobs
| at a time, on 5 different projects. Naturally I feel a lot of
| stress and cognitive burden while doing this but I figured it's
| part of the job.
|
| Is this normal for backend, distributed-computing heavy jobs? Is
| there a better strategy I can adopt? Should I try to get a new
| role with a shorter compile-test feedback loop?
| tracyhenry wrote:
| Have you tried to alert yourself when a long-running job
| finishes? I know it might exacerbate context switching, but it
| often feels bad to know that a job has finished long long ago
| and that I've been playing my phone without knowing it.
|
| A relevant HN post:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26259007
| [deleted]
| curiousllama wrote:
| Multitasking in this context means doing multiple things
| concurrently, not consecutively. It may be hard to launch a
| job, switch over to configure another one, switch back when you
| get the results from the first, finish launching the second,
| reconfigure & relaunch the first, and then move on to the third
| while 1 & 2 are running etc etc etc... but it's not strictly
| multitasking, it's just ocntext switching.
|
| Also hard, also expensive, just different.
| jvidalv wrote:
| Get a frontend job, instant compile time haha
| OhSoHumble wrote:
| Yeah, but the loss of sanity usually cancels out the
| productivity gains.
| pyridines wrote:
| Not necessarily, our frontend repo takes almost as long as
| the backend to compile. I'm hoping we switch to esbuild at
| some point.
| Impassionata wrote:
| If you constrain 'performance' to things which can be easily
| measured and then test how multitasking affects those
| measurements, you can come to some broad conclusions that are
| also useless.
| goatcode wrote:
| I wonder what this says about pair programming, given that
| writing code and communicating are pretty different tasks,
| according to imaging:
| https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-12-brain-code-decipher-n...
| cma wrote:
| Or "talk me through it as you do it" whiteboard interviewing
| josefresco wrote:
| My wife (like many wives) multi-tasks to the extreme.
| Coordinating our household, and running a business means she
| always has about 100 things in her brain at once. Always on her
| phone, always planning, making lists, researching, ordering. It's
| certainly common, and a wonder to witness however I worry about
| the effects on her brain, as she has trouble sometimes vocalizing
| her thoughts. She often forgets someone's name, or something's
| name and it takes her a minute to slow down and find the words.
| It's happening more and more, and concerns her. I wonder if it's
| a byproduct of just age or years of multi-tasking and "mind
| juggling" so many things.
| periheli0n wrote:
| I recognize those symptoms. Happens to me too when stress
| levels have been constantly elevated for a while. Usually
| that's also when stupid errors start creeping into what I do. I
| think it might be an early sign of burnout.
| gobins wrote:
| I wonder if it is a biological thing. My wife excels at
| multitasking but I can barely do two things at a time. I did
| notice the delayed speech with my wife as well.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I'd hope not as I'm good at it, but my wife is awful at it.
| She pauses the TV to read a text message.
| VRay wrote:
| haha, it's the same deal for me and my wife
|
| I'll gladly do 2-3 things at once all day, but she has to
| pause the TV to answer a question or read a text message
|
| I don't think I'm as good at multitasking as lot of people
| in this thread, though.. I can multitask while programming
| and _feel like_ I 'm doing a great job, but then in
| retrospect it's clear that my output was maybe 20% of what
| it would've been if I'd been fully focused
|
| I found that out in college, homework assignments would
| take 30 minutes at my desk or multiple hours in front of
| the TV
|
| I think I need to get better about silencing Slack and
| keeping the web browser closed at work, come to think of
| it.. It's dang frustrating having to wait 2+ minutes for
| something to compile and run though..
| andrewstuart wrote:
| My primary school age son, and anecdotally, lots of other kids of
| similar age, relentlessly multitask in ways that hurts my brain
| just to think about.
|
| He literally is playing a game, watching a YouTube video in
| another screen, and talking to friends at the same time, and in
| the most extreme case, is even listening to an audiobook or
| podcast as well.
|
| Asking kids about it, they all say that's just what they do and
| look at us oldies like we are from the 20th century or something.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| I'm in my 20s and actually I do the same thing your son does
| pretty regularly. If it's a game I need to pay attention to
| then I wouldn't be watching a video though.
| lordnacho wrote:
| What about school itself? Why is it that you go for 45 minutes
| of English, then math, then French, then art, and PE?
|
| Strikes me as the worst context switching waste imaginable.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| That's a pretty wide amount of tasks, and more than that it's a
| lot of sensory input. It makes me wonder if they are actually
| processing any of it or just letting it sort of wash over them.
|
| Like at the end of it could they give you a detailed report
| about what happened with any one of those things? Even just
| asking for the gist of things, I imagine at least one of those
| things is being tuned out entirely.
|
| For instance, I often game and talk with friends at the same
| time. That's pretty normal I think, especially if we're playing
| the same game together. I could easily have a podcast on and a
| youtube video playing, and from my girlfriend's perspective I'd
| look like I was trying to do it all at once. But realistically
| there's no way I'd be able to give the podcast or the YouTube
| any attention. They'd just be on.
| tshaddox wrote:
| This sounds more like entertainment or leisure time, so I
| don't know how important "processing any of it" really is.
| Giving a detailed report about what happened certainly
| doesn't seem to be a goal, and I don't see why it ought to
| be. If you're trying to relax or be entertained, and you are
| succeeding, that seems fine to me.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Sure, but that has nothing to do with why I wrote my
| comment. It's fine for people to spend their leisure time
| however they want. If you want to focus on a single thing
| like reading a book, or sit in a room in quiet
| contemplation, or turn on every electronic in your house, I
| don't care.
|
| I'm just curious if the latter is really the same as multi-
| tasking. It's reasonable to question if having a lot of
| sensory input thrown at you that you are mostly ignoring is
| the same thing as multi-tasking.
| nickphx wrote:
| I would say it's not. To me, multi-tasking implies you're
| completing a task, you have a set goal in mind with a
| series of steps or focused work required to achieve the
| goal or end result of the task.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| Realistically, this is having friends over while playing a game
| and tv/music on in the background. It really isn't all that out
| of the ordinary, and something we've done for quite some time.
| Heck, we did a version of this while getting very, very stoned
| and playing a PS1. None of it requires a lot of attention: You
| can rewatch/relisten to folks on youtube. Games don't need a
| lot of sounds, and if you die, you can restart. Friends will
| repeat if asked.
| foobarian wrote:
| Similar situation, second grade son. I like to think that when
| not going outside a bunch, where the sensory bandwidth is
| immense, they have an easy time replacing it with streams of
| digital input like that. Sure they are able to do all these
| things simultaneously that seem impressive, but we would be
| able to instantly gauge how far a dozen points of interest are,
| notice tracks on the ground, unusual plants, hidden animals,
| hear animal calls, etc.
| mvanaltvorst wrote:
| I wonder if brain structures of children are getting wired
| differently to better accommodate for multitasking in the
| modern Information Age. I would imagine that if you multitask
| all day, your brain would adapt to do this context switching
| more effortlessly, probably at the cost of something else that
| the brain judges as less important. Not saying that that's a
| bad thing, I'm just curious.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| Sure, but these are all just fun things, none of which really
| require any focus. My kid does this too, but when it is time to
| do homework even having music on has an immediately obvious
| negative effect.
| wvenable wrote:
| I've noticed the exact same thing. My son will constantly be
| doing multiple things at once -- watch a youtube video while
| playing a game, etc.
|
| Although when I was a kid a literally did everything with the
| TV on in the background.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| And I did college physics homework with the tape deck
| running. (I'd turn it off when I really needed to focus,
| though...)
| Graffur wrote:
| That is possible because your son doesn't HAVE to do any of
| those things. He wants to do them. There's no external pressure
| - deadlines, impressions. There's no reluctance. There's no
| examination of how well he listened to any of it.
| periheli0n wrote:
| It would be interesting to see how much of all that information
| is actually retained. I bet kids are much better at filtering
| out background noise than grown-ups are.
| pizza wrote:
| Why be in a single state of flow when you can dip into and
| cycle through multiple flow states simultaneously. Only saying
| this semi-sarcastically. There is a kind of janky skill of
| knowing how to allocate attention while 'multiconsuming', but
| I'd be wary of doing it for anything that matters/multitasking
| simply because you start wading into the risk of unknown-
| unknowns territory, when you ignore crucial potentially info
| mapcars wrote:
| This is not true, there are yogis who can do dozens and even
| hundreds things at the same time. These researchers study people
| who never did any work on their mind and make statements about
| whole humanity.
| Jiocus wrote:
| Are you telling me these people don't need Kubernetes
| engineering in their operations and still deliver value to
| their clients?
| mapcars wrote:
| Well, even in my company we don't have Kubernetes. I'm not a
| devops so can't elaborate more on this one :)
| leoh wrote:
| I have never heard of this, source?
| mapcars wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzlIfzj6xfo
| throwawaygimp wrote:
| Warning - I read some early research about this topic, something
| I was interested in at the time, around 15 years ago. Since then
| I've been actively trying to avoid multitasking as much as
| possible over the last decade or so.
|
| It did, I believe, have one unforeseen side-effect: I now
| struggle to multitask in relatively simple situations where it's
| necessary. Maybe it's just because I'm getting older (42), but I
| seem to struggle with it much more than any of my peers.
|
| Still, I wouldn't change anything. I believe I'm as or more
| productive per unit of time than anyone I've worked with.
|
| Edit - one more side effect: I used to regularly work 12+ hour
| days. Now I'm _completely_ spent after 7-8 hours, as those hours
| are so intense.
| slver wrote:
| Previous studies:
|
| - "Women 'better at multitasking' than men, study finds"
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-24645100
|
| This study:
|
| - "Multitasking Lowers IQ"
|
| - "Successful People Don't Multitask"
|
| - "While more research is needed to determine if multitasking is
| physically damaging the brain (versus existing brain damage that
| predisposes people to multitask), it's clear that multitasking
| has negative effects."
|
| I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| _I don 't know whether to laugh or cry._
|
| You can do both but not at the same time.
| tzs wrote:
| > "Women 'better at multitasking' than men, study finds"
|
| They tested this on Mythbusters and got the same result [1].
|
| [1] https://mythresults.com/battle-of-the-sexes-round-2
| diogenescynic wrote:
| Multitasking adds more stress and in my experience also leads to
| burnout a lot quicker. It also makes more errors which makes it
| counter-productive in a lot of cases.
| agumonkey wrote:
| personal anecdote but after trying too hard and feeling actual
| physical "pain" I came to the conclusion that learning needs a
| threshold of closure (which feels good), a coarse level
| conclusion about what was just processed. Piling up unconclusive
| signals on top of each other results in wounds it seems.
| calderarrow wrote:
| Somewhat of a personal tangent, but I exclusively use 1 screen,
| and rarely split windows or have more than 1 application open
| when working. When I need to bounce between code/browser,
| documentation/code, or email/HN, I use the alt/command-tab
| functionality.
|
| I find it slower having to switch between viewing different
| screens or moving my head, yet I'm the only one in my friend
| group who does this -- everyone else seems to prefer dual
| monitors.
|
| I'm curious if HN people find that dual monitors feel like more
| of a distraction, and if it's at all related to multitasking.
| buwka wrote:
| I definitely find dual monitors or more for splitting code,
| documentation, or other relevant project information to be
| similar to having multiple papers lying across my desk. I don't
| want to stack the pages on top of one another but instead I
| prefer to lie them all on one large desk. Usually I'm only
| working on one page but need other references. If another paper
| truly is important than I can use Spectacle to quickly
| reorganize.
|
| Having email, slack, discord, or HN open is an absolute no go.
| Nothing more distracting than focusing on a project and seeing
| new emails or messages stream in. I try to limit those to a
| separate laptop or tablet at all times.
| Graffur wrote:
| It's not so much about number of monitors but screen estate.
| Graffur wrote:
| Can I show this to my boss..? Jokes aside, I literally have felt
| the effects of multitasking in work. My brain stopped working
| effectively. In addition, I lost all desire to work.
|
| I wish there wasn't a book advertised at the bottom of this
| article. I feel like I can't share it.
| grouphugs wrote:
| ahh, yes, the fickle balance between retaining and oligarchy and
| not letting it work you too hard
|
| well, that's just not gonna work is it
| acituan wrote:
| Yet multitasking is still being branded as something of a higher
| cognitive functioning. Byung-Chul Han in The Burnout Society
| claims that it is the opposite:
|
| > "The attitude toward time and environment known as
| "multitasking' does not represent civilisational progress. Human
| beings in the late-modern society of work and information are not
| the only ones capable of multitasking. Rather, such an aptitude
| amounts to regression. Multitasking is commonplace among wild
| animals. It is an attentive technique indispensable for survival
| in the wilderness.
|
| > An animal busy with eating must also attend to other tasks. For
| example, it must hold rivals away from its prey. It must
| constantly be on the lookout, lest it be eaten while eating. At
| the same time, it must guard its young and keep an eye on its
| sexual partner. In the wild, the animal is forced to divide its
| attention between various activities. That is why animals are
| incapable of contemplative immersion--either they are eating or
| they are copulating."
|
| > ...
|
| > We owe the cultural achievements of humanity--which include
| philosophy--to deep, contemplative attention."
| TameAntelope wrote:
| > A study at the University of London found that participants who
| multitasked during cognitive tasks experienced IQ score declines
| that were similar to what they'd expect if they had smoked
| marijuana or stayed up all night.
|
| Does anyone know which study this is?
| zeristor wrote:
| University of London just sounds a bit wonky, a reputable UoL
| college such as: UCL, King's QMW, SoAS, LSE, or Birkbeck would
| be recognisable by name.
|
| Imperial was part of UoL until 2007.
| 238475235243 wrote:
| There are people who have had a cognitive impairment they've
| worked with and they're are people who haven't.
|
| If you have a brain injury, head trauma, stroke, cognitive
| migraine.... You're aware of the space you vacate. You can feel
| it missing and its "a thing".
|
| For everyone else, you just convince yourself you're just as
| effective as you were. You think multitasking works or driving
| after two beers is ok. You're not aware of what is outside of
| your constrained cognition.
| djabatt wrote:
| I must be brain dead because I have been in multitasking mode for
| a decade with small months of hyper focus sprints. Sadly a modern
| life brings many opportunities. I know for sure the Internet has
| made my focus a challenge.....
| periheli0n wrote:
| From a computer science perspective, context switching is hugely
| expensive in humans, and that's why they are not good at
| multitasking.
|
| Strictly speaking, even computers don't execute multiple tasks in
| parallel, at least not on the same core. Even with
| hyperthreading, each step in the pipeline can only work on one
| datum at a time. Computation is always serialised, and any
| context switching comes at a cost. It's just that in computers
| this cost doesn't matter so much, and/or it's outweighed by the
| benefits of weaving tasks into each other.
|
| Nevertheless, Multitasking is a myth, technically.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Maybe I'm just refusing to let go of a useful tool, but how many
| tasks do I really need to do at an above-8-yr-old level?
|
| It could be perfectly acceptable to apply 15 fewer IQ points
| across the board to my problems if I can get more of those
| problems solved in a fixed amount of time.
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| Remember, this doesn't mean you can't get multiple things done.
| Just do them one at a time wherever possible. You'll actually get
| all the things you need to do done faster
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