Multitasking Millennials: How Being Constantly Connected Is Killing Your Productivity

Multitasking as we know it is seen as an almost superhuman ability to get more than one thing done at once. I’m not talking about chatting to a friend while cooking dinner – that’s child’s play. I’m talking about real multitasking – being able to skim through your emails while in a meeting, while also taking notes, or looking something up online while chatting on the phone. Multitasking is the epitome of productivity.. Or is it?

Research by Clifford Nass at Stanford found that, actually, the more people multitask, the more they are training their brains to be scattered and “the less you’re able to learn, concentrate, or be nice to people”. To put it mildly, this doesn’t seem ideal. It might be time to stop distracting ourselves and start figuring out how to fix this.
So what is multitasking, really?

According to the American Psychological Association, “multitasking can take place when someone tries to perform two tasks simultaneously, switch from one task to another, or perform two or more tasks in rapid succession” Put another way, multitasking is actually task switching, not multitasking, since people can’t actually do more than one task at a time.
Millennials and younger generations seem particularly susceptible to one form of multitasking in particular: media multitasking. Think: switching from a notification on your phone, to a new email, back to Snapchat or your news app, all while Skyping with a client.

Millennials are the first generation of digital natives. We didn’t have to learn each new technology as it was developed, like Baby Boomers and Gen X did. We’ve never known anything but a digital world and are therefore constantly plugged in. I’m sure I’m not the only one with 50 tabs open, a smartphone buzzing away on my desk and a constant stream of social media notifications pinging away.

Why is this so bad?

Well here comes the bit about why you’re distracted, scattered, and mean to co-workers.
According to a study at PLOS, media multitasking “has been associated with negative psychosocial and cognitive impacts. Individuals who engage in heavier media-multitasking are found to perform worse on cognitive control tasks and exhibit more socio-emotional difficulties.”

Not only that, but these effects are potentially long term. The researchers found that heavier media multitaskers (looking at you, Millennials) had smaller gray matter density in the part of the brain responsible for higher cognitive and emotional and motivational processes.

How to recover your productivity

In an interview with Fast Company, author and Professor Cal Newport stated that “high-quality work produced is a function of two things—the amount of time you spend on the work and the intensity of your focus during this time. If you can increase your focus, you’ll get more done in less time.”

It’s all well and good deciding to focus on your work, but in reality, this is easier said than done. You first need to “wean yourself off an addiction to distraction”, then you can start challenging yourself to focus. Achieving true productivity seems more to do with who is able to not multitask, as who is.
Scary potential long term effects aside, there are several tactics you can use to wean yourself off your devices and stop media multitasking, at least in the short term. One of the more dramatic moves is to unplug completely or go off grid for a while.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk at Psychology Today found that a “week off grid “calibrated” my sense of what normal task switching is”. And I totally agree – when my phone was stolen last year I made do with a very old, not very smart phone for a couple of weeks. Even though I wasn’t totally unplugged, once I got a new phone I found it much easier to stash it away for hours at a time, and even became slightly annoyed by the constant buzzing interruptions to my day.
If you’re not prepared to go completely off grid, you can take smaller steps such as turning off your phone notifications, or as Cal Newport suggests, “scheduling the times outside of work when you will use your phone or tablet, and then put the technology away outside those times.”

Getting back into the flow

Once you’ve weaned yourself off your devices, and are more used to concentrating for longer stretches of time, you can start trying to tap into deep work or “flow”. Here’s where a little tech can creep back in (emphasis on the ‘little’).

Ever wondered why you can concentrate for hours on a video game, but struggle to do the same at your desk? Studies show that game soundtracks soothe the mind and boost concentration and focus, and therefore make it more likely to put you in the “flow” state. You can put this to your advantage by listening to ambient music (or game soundtracks!) while you try to focus. Brain.fm is one of my absolute favorite tools for this.

There are a million other apps to choose from to help you along the way. Pomodoro timers, to-do apps, distraction-free modes on most writing software, apps that restrict your Facebook use, apps that deny access to your phone, and the aforementioned ambient noise apps. Give these tools a go, try out a few of them in combination and find what works for you. Once you’ve figured out how to focus, your productivity will soar. Hopefully you’ll be able to nip the long term effects in the bud too!