One at a Time!

It’s 11:23 p.m. You attempt to finish the work that’s due at midnight with the utmost effort. You begin to do two or more tasks at the same time, trying your best to swiftly accomplish anything at all. A few seconds before the deadline, you barely manage to submit these projects and assignments on time, an achievement that gives you satisfaction. What you just did there was a process that most people regularly do: multitasking. 

Burdened with various responsibilities and tasks, many frequently turn toward multitasking as a way to finish numerous things as quickly as possible. People use multitasking in many aspects of their everyday lives. Whether it be in activities as seemingly frivolous as reading while eating, multitasking is common in one form or another. For certain people, it has even become an essential part of their lifestyle and routine. Furthermore, ever since the rise of digital technologies, media multitasking—using different kinds of media at once—has become prevalent, especially among the youth. An action as simple as browsing a device while listening to a podcast is a form of media multitasking.

Importantly, procrastination often results in multitasking. It prompts individuals, mostly students and young adolescents, to complete their duties close to upcoming deadlines through multitasking. The common lack of self-control among the youth generally leads to a tendency to procrastinate, which in turn leads to the need to multitask. Furthermore, those who struggle with self-discipline can also display forms of multitasking that lead to procrastination. For example, a teenager who is in the middle of an assignment can switch to a disruptive activity like browsing social media. This not only delays the work that needs to be done, but also reinforces the person’s reliance on simple indulgence. Self-gratification can be a major source of distraction for many, especially with digital devices being ubiquitous in their environment. As a result, both performance and attention span can be negatively affected by habits that heavily rely on multitasking.

However, “multitasking” is in fact a phenomenon that no human will ever be able to truly accomplish. Over millions of years, humans have evolved to specialize in focusing on one task at a time. The human brain comprises multiple dependent networks that are built to maximize attention and cognitive thinking on a single problem or task, minimizing all forms of interference. Many cognitive and attention processes are unconsciously facilitated together in order to perform efficiently and effectively. Human cognitive functions are at their best when it comes to monotasking, a method that puts all attention into a single activity or job. The process of doing two or more tasks simultaneously is near unfeasible to the human mind. What people commonly perceive as multitasking is simply a misinterpretation of switching one’s focus from one task to another.

Both the executive and orienting attention networks, major regulators of human focus, are subjected to alternation and switching of informational input and outputs. Whenever a person involuntarily performs multiple tasks at once, the focus on the varying sources of sensory information alternates, ultimately interrupting one prior task to the next for a brief moment. Moreover, as the brain tries to prioritize one stimulus over another, the type of sensory information switches depending on what the brain chooses to turn its attention to. If a person who was painting an art piece were to be suddenly distracted by a loud commotion, then the person’s main focus of attention would momentarily shift from a visual input to an auditory input. The switch would then reasonably prompt the painter to check the location of the external auditory commotion, essentially changing the orientation of the individual’s attention to be towards the commotion and away from the painting. At the same time, the painter’s response of willingly checking and learning more about the external stimulus would be under the executive attention system, displaying a minor form of self-control of either resisting a distraction or not. These networks altogether influence our attention span while taking into account environmental stimuli. 

However, in the context of a voluntary multitasking situation, forcing the brain to tune its underlying attention network systems to attempt to focus on more than one activity would bring about switch costs: diminished performance of attention networks as a result of repeatedly switching from one task to another. The brain finds difficulty in trying to multitask, placing greater stress on attention networks like dorsal, frontoparietal, and ventral systems, which are responsible for a person’s voluntary orientation and attention focus. As the brain continues to meticulously encode which stream of information should be prioritized, the frequency of interference among relevant and irrelevant information will increase and cause disruptions between interconnected networks. 

A person who relies on multitasking rather than focusing on a single task is prone to both lower time efficiency and possible errors. Those who often multitask underperform compared to those who don’t when it comes to actions that require the extensive use of working memory, long-term memory, and sustained attention. Moreover, in the realm of media multitasking, those who are heavily involved in media exposure perform measurably worse by displaying larger task switch costs. A person who recently spent a lot of time with their cellular phone would find it challenging to find motivation and energy to direct their focus to work. Multimedia streams have become a platform where many young adolescents and children spend a lot of their time. Individuals who undergo excessive multitasking experience more brain fatigue, causing them to get distracted and exhausted more frequently. 

The best alternative for multitasking is perhaps the complete opposite. Monotasking allows people to put all their effort, attention, and thinking into one task only, which is what the human mind was specifically designed for. Prioritizing tasks builds efficiency and also reinforces memory retention better, with more room for honing cognitive skills as well as creative thinking processes. Additionally, simple self-control methods, such as time management through a common technique called “time-blocking,” allow people to categorize tasks under different time intervals, which is an effective way to avoid multitasking in the first place. 

Although multitasking remains impractical, many individuals continue to perform it to some extent as a main way to deal with responsibilities. While the possible long-term effects of multitasking make it quite unappealing, it continues to be widespread among the youth. The phenomenon has piqued the interest of researchers for decades and serves to be an integral part of understanding the human brain’s attention networks and other psychological functions. The way the brain mainly facilitates focus through monotasking continues to be unraveled by scientists, with such human limitations serving as areas for question and learning.