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The Multitasking Virus

In my Buddhist practice, I've been cultivating attention. As so often happens, I ran into an article this morning that clearly related to weekend reading and thinking about mindfulness. For years I took pride in my ability to "multitask," which really means that I've been able to slice my time and plug in one chore while another is lagging. I let myself believe that I was doing multiple tasks at once, but that's impossible: rather, in multitasking you move attention from one focus to another, always focusing on one thing. Though it feels clever, it doesn't work with really complex task because there's attention overhead in getting into the complexity, so you can't bounce in and out or two and from quickly.

I've come to believe that, if your dominant style involves multitasking, you're inherently shallow and scattered. If you're clever, you might have a bit more depth and focus than someone who isn't, but the division of attention that's inherent with multitasking is, I believe, detrimental to the overall quality of attention, therefore execution.

Buddhism talks about mindfulness and bare attention. As I understand it, bare attention is attention without discrimination or conceptualization, and mindfulness is presence in the moment. I find myself wondering whether multitasking contradicts either of these concepts?

Much digression. I was going to discuss the helpful article I found this morning via Tim Ferriss: part one of "The Multitasking Virus and the End of Learning?" by Josh Waitz, a chess master and martial artist who was the subject of the film "Searching for Bobby Fischer." Waitz has written a book called The Art of Learning: A Journey Into the Pursuit of Excellence, based on his own metalearning experiences. In the current article, he views multitasking as a form of inattention.

On this afternoon, April 16, 2008, [Professor Dennis] Dalton was describing the satyagraha of Mahatma Gandhi, building the discussion around the Amritsar massacre in 1919, when British colonial soldiers opened fire on 10,000 unarmed Indian men, women and children trapped in Jallianwala Bagh Garden. For 39 years, Professor Dalton has been inspiring Columbia and Barnard students with his two semester political theory series that introduces undergrads to the ideas of Gandhi, Thoreau, Mill, Malcolm X, King, Plato, Lao Tzu. His lectures are about themes, connections between disparate minds, the powerful role of the individual in shaping our world.

Dalton is a life changer, and this was one of his last lectures before retirement.

Over the course of a riveting 75-minute discussion of the birth of Gandhian non-violent activism, I found myself becoming increasingly distressed as I watched students cruising Facebook, checking out the NY Times, editing photo collections, texting, reading People Magazine, shopping for jeans, dresses, sweaters, and shoes on Ebay, Urban Outfitters and J. Crew, reorganizing their social calendars, emailing on Gmail and AOL, playing solitaire, doing homework for other classes, chatting on AIM, and buying tickets on Expedia (I made a list because of my disbelief). From my perspective in the back of the room, while Dalton vividly described desperate Indian mothers throwing their children into a deep well to escape the barrage of bullets, I noticed that a girl in front of me was putting her credit card information into Urban Outfitters.com. She had finally found her shoes!

Students think they're multi-tasking, he says, but "the human mind cannot, in fact, multi-task without drastically reducing the quality of our processing." He says that "on the educational front, multi-tasking feels ... like a symptom of a broader sense of alienation."

In part two, Waitzkin is going to talk about the crisis that ended his chess career, and how it relates to disengagement.

jon posted this at 10:38 AM
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