Why monotasking can make you more productive

0:00This message comes from Mattress Firm. Sharing a bed doesn't have to mean restless nights. Mattress Firm's sleep experts can match you with a Tempur-Pedic Split King sleep system. Get a$300 instant gift with purchase. They make sleep easy. WBUR Podcasts. Boston. True multitasking is mostly not possible. And so what your brain is doing is just toggling. And every time you do that, there's a little bit of switching cost. Did you catch that? Multitasking is out. And monotasking is in.

0:46it's friday august 14th and this is here and now anytime from npr and wbur boston i'm kaliani today on the show we'll spend some time enveloping ourselves in the blues music scene in Detroit, with Marsha Battle Philpott, the daughter of Joe Battle, who opened a record store there in 1945. He was very, very successful. And he began to have relationships with other record companies and all kinds of stuff. But first, I'm going to challenge a little workplace norm. We've all been told that being a multitasker is an essential skill in the modern work world. Your bosses like it, and you may pride yourself on being good at it.

1:31Well, it's time for a bit of a reality check. The research shows that multitasking actually makes most people less productive. In fact, it makes us more stressed out and worse at our jobs. So what should we be doing instead? Our next guest says we should actually be monotasking. David Epstein writes about human performance and productivity. His latest book is called Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better. And he spoke with Indira Lakshmanan about his thesis. So multitasking gives us the sense that we're busy, we're getting things done. You argue that multitasking actually leads us to make more mistakes, increases our stress, and makes the same work take longer.

2:18First, explain what is happening inside our brains when we try to multitask. True multitasking is mostly not possible. Like you can walk and have a conversation at the same time because walking is automated in your brain. But in terms of multiple cognitive tasks, you actually can't do it. And so what your brain is doing is just toggling and switching. It really has to do what cognitive scientists call dropping one set of rules and activating another set of rules for a different task. And every time you do that, there's a little bit of switching cost where if you picture your brain like a whiteboard.

2:53When you switch, you erase the whiteboard, but there's that residue from the marker still there. And that's a little bit of that builds up every time you task switch. And so the more you do it in a day, the more cognitive bandwidth you're losing, you're clogging up, and it doesn't reset basically until you get to sleep. You looked at the research of UC Irvine psychologist Gloria Mark, who studies how humans interact with technology in daily life. More than 20 years ago, back in 2003, she studied how often office workers switched tasks. Back then, it was every three minutes. More recently, in 2022, office workers were switching tasks every 45 seconds.

3:34I imagine if she did that study again today, we'd be switching tasks even more rapidly. So put it plainly, what is driving us to multitask even more, even faster than ever before? A lot of it is the rise of asynchronous communication. So you might have Slack, you might have email, you might have some other internal messaging system or some dashboard that's sending you notifications. Your phone obviously sends notifications. I mean, and the thing is, right, you're expected to respond quickly. And that's the very thing that's going to make you not only worse at your work, more stressed. There's a little evidence now that task switching affects your immune function.

4:14So that doesn't look great. Dr. Mark recommends what she calls blocking work. So what she found in one of her studies was that office workers on average checked email 77 times a day. Wow. But if you could turn that into one or two or three or even five different blocks in the day where you're doing email in that block and you're not doing something else, and then in the next block you're doing something else and not doing email, anything you can do to reduce the number of switches, you're going to take up less of that cognitive bandwidth, you're going to be more productive by the end of the day, and really importantly, you're going to feel less stressed.

4:49And this is by physiological measures like heart rate variability that Dr. Mark and others were tracking people with at work. David, I have to ask about media multitasking, which is a new term I've seen lately about using more than one digital device or media stream at the same time. So it means that people are multitasking even during their leisure time. They're texting their friends while they're watching TV. They're checking social media while they're listening to a podcast or playing video games. Are we kidding ourselves if we think we can process so much information at once? You will have lower comprehension of certain things because your brain is, again, switching.

5:28It's making these micro switches. There's this research on software engineers who will find they even turn their music off when they're doing something like really cognitively engaged. Or anyone's probably had the experience of driving and looking for an address and they turn the radio down. That's not because the radio is getting in the way of your eyes. It's because it takes up some of your mental capacity that you need to be searching for this address. So if it's somewhat familiar material, not too complex, I think you can do that. But you will tend to catch somewhat less of everything. But it does train your attention span.

6:02So as Dr. Mark found, even if you take away all the distractions, like you say, okay, I've been multitasking a ton, and you say, now I'm going to be focused, you will self-interrupt with intrusive thoughts at the rate to which you've become accustomed because you've trained your attention span as if we have some kind of internal barometer. And so you kind of have to train your ability to focus back if you want to be able to focus for long blocks. Well, you write that many of the greatest writers in history have famously employed techniques to help them maintain their focus. Maya Angelou rented hotel rooms and took artwork off the walls so she wouldn't be distracted.

6:39Victor Hugo locked up his clothes while he was writing so he couldn't change and go outside. You met with the Chilean writer Isabel Allende, who has managed to write one book every 18 months for 43 years. What did she tell you about how she's able to maintain her intense focus? Yeah, her life is all centered around ritual and carving a space for her work. So she published her first book when she was about 40, and she started it on January 8th. It started as a letter to her grandfather, who was close to dying. and that became a novel, her first novel, The House of the Spirits, which was kind of a blockbuster.

7:18But from then on, again, starting around age 40, she decided every January 8th, if she had finished the previous book, she would start a new one and started organizing her life around this day where people in her life started to realize if you need something from Isabel, you better get it by January 7th, because then she's going into this full focus mode and she would keep a space that was only for this. And she would close the door. At the end of the day, she said, my story lives in there. Nobody's allowed to go in. And it's waiting for me the next day. And as she told me, without structure and silence, she never could have done this.

7:55And what she did was write a bestselling book every year and a half for now 43 years. Incredible. We should all be so lucky or so focused. So in your work, you also have talked about research that shows it's important for us to work in intervals. And so one example is Maya Angelou says she would take breaks from writing to do crossword puzzles. And she described it as toggling between her big mind used for writing and her little mind used for simpler tasks. So explain how taking breaks could help us improve our productivity. Yeah, I love that. And to your point before about switching media when you're kind of relaxing, it's okay to do like mindless things too, right?

8:38We don't have to be focused all the time. And in fact, your attention is like a bucket. And what you want to do is take a break before the bucket overflows. So you don't want to get to the red line where you're kind of feeling fried and then you take the break. because you'll need a lot less break time if when you're getting toward that, you say, all right, I'm switching to my crossword puzzle or, you know, a little semi-mindless scrolling or whatever it is that stuff's okay to do. And it kind of resets your ability to pay attention because we're not really built, you know, this paying attention, especially to abstract ideas and words and concepts and all these things for hours on end is not really a part of our evolutionary history.

9:22and we're not that well set up to do it. And so probably every hour or two, if you can take a few minutes and do something a little mindless, that's a little bit fun and isn't really taxing your brain, that's actually a good thing to do. David, we all want to be more successful in work and in our personal lives. So what is your advice to us to become successful monotaskers? How will it make us more successful and happier? First of all, realize that this isn't just a work productivity issue. It's a huge stress management issue. That was one of the big revelations to me, all this research showing that it's like physically bad for you to be constantly toggling over time.

10:05And then I think starting with small blocks, right? If your attention has been incredibly fragmented, you can't, as I mentioned, it gets trained, your attention gets trained to switch. And so you can't just say overnight, I'm going to make it different. So I would start with a few blocks. Start with a 30-minute or even a 15-minute block where you, like when you're brushing your teeth, look at yourself brushing your teeth instead of talking or trying to balance on one foot or clean something at the same time. So try to apply it in all the little places in your life and then start with these small blocks and you'll probably start to feel the difference once you get accustomed to it, once you start getting over the urge to check.

10:45It's good to put your phone out of your vision. So these studies that show that if it's even visible, it will reduce your cognitive ability because you're thinking about what might be there if you check. So put it away and try to start with these small blocks. David Epstein writes about human performance and productivity. His latest book is Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better. David, thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me. Coming up next, Marsha Battle Philpott has seen Detroit change shape many times over the decades. Her father, Joe Battle, opened a record store there in the 1940s, where he recorded blues guitarist John Lee Hooker and Baptist preacher C.L.

11:25Franklin. You may know his daughter. Her name was Aretha, as in Aretha Franklin.

11:35After the break, Scott Tong speaks with Marsha Battle Philpott about her father's store, her own musical education, and her experience in a changing Detroit. That's coming up in just a moment. Shake my hand.

12:17and get 50 % off your first coaching session at strawberry.me slash NPR. You know how every once in a while you meet a person whose family story helps tell a bigger story of a place? I'm talking about Detroit and a daughter of the city with many titles, cultural historian, former labor activist, author, poet, music preservationist, opera performer. Well, my name is Marsha Battle Philpott, but I am also known as Marsha Music. Marsha Battle Philpott has spent many of her 72 years telling her version of Detroit's story. It's industrial boom. It's hollowing out and racial clashes. And now it's recovery.

12:58It's a complex story with music throughout. See, her father, Jovan Battle, was a record producer. But let's back up. Philpott's father, like many black men, went to Detroit in the days of Jim Crow. My father was a part of this migration that came here to the north from the south. He was born and raised in Macon, Georgia. Eventually, he got a job at a Chrysler factory during World War II. Detroit back then was the country's fourth largest city behind New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. It was peak Detroit. And work was extremely plentiful because it's wartime production. And so it was common for people that were up here, these blacks who had come here, to work one job for eight hours or 10 even, and then walk across the street to the factory across the street and work in the next job for another eight or 10 hours.

13:54After the war, he got laid off. Auto plants were putting in more machines to replace people, and most black workers had low seniority. So Marsha Battle Philpott's father opened a storefront, Joe's Record Shop, to sell records and to record musicians and speakers. He was very, very successful. And he began to have relationships with other record companies and all kinds of stuff. But he wanted to record. And he had recorded John Lee Hooker.

14:34who was a blues guy that was his buddy and who walked up and down Haston Street playing his guitar because that's what people did in those days. You know, that time period, people were very, very musical. And he recorded a famous Detroit Baptist minister, C.L. Franklin. When this boy brought his lunch to Jesus, Jesus looked at him and asked him to give it over. My dad, once he began recording the Reverend C.L. Franklin, would play these records out of the loudspeaker, and church would break out on Hastings Street. And people would be shouting and screaming and going through the whole church things right on the street.

15:18They'd have to call the police, you know, to break up the crowds. At one point, you know, Reverend Franklin has this daughter, and she can sing like a grown woman. Lead me on

15:36To the light

15:43Roll Take my hand The daughter, of course, is Aretha Franklin.

15:55And she's so extraordinary in a city of extraordinary singers. Detroit is no joke. He recorded Aretha Franklin's very first records and so gospel records before she made a transition into secular music. By the time Marsha Battle Philpott was born in 1954, Detroit was struggling, hemorrhaging people and companies, all leaving for the suburbs, including Ford, Chrysler, GM. You know, we commonly say the term, well, white people abandon Detroit. But I don't think that people, individual homeowners, families, I don't believe they abandon cities. But industry abandoned the city. Corporate entities abandoned Detroit and then compelled people to follow.

16:47And a lot of that was done by developers, real estate interests, that fomented this pushing of white Detroiters out of the city by fomenting a lot of racial hatred, fear. The suburbs became overwhelmingly white, the city mostly black, and that is when many black neighborhoods got demolished. 1959 brought the construction of Interstate 375 in the city. They got the word that there was going to be a freeway built. And that freeway was going to replace everything on Hastings Street, including all of the businesses. Took it all out? Just gone. Gone. Gone. Oh. And it's a freeway now. Her dad moved his store to a new part of town.

17:36But it's never the same. It's not the same. The community is not the same. The music that they want to listen to is not the same. It's not the old time sound, you know There's a different kind of new music and even his own kids don't want to listen to his music You know, I don't want to hear Lightning Hopkins. I don't want to hear Johnny Hooker. I want to hear Stevie Wonder I want to hear the Temptations

18:14And by 1964, Marsha Battle Philpott wanted to hear, you guessed it, The Beatles. I want to hold your hand. I want to hold your hand. And boy, did I, and every child I knew, loved The Beatles. People maybe think that black people didn't like The Beatles. You know, because I don't know, they think it was so separate from popular culture. But I mean, that's what we listen to, too. Come on now. We just love the Beatles. Oh, my God, we love the Beatles. They, unlike any of the mainstream or white musical artists here that began to play black music, in Europe, they always acknowledged where the music came from.

19:06The Beatles would make sure that they would always say, you know, this is an old blues record by so-and-so. It's hard to describe how revolutionary that was, how stunning that was, for a white person to admit that that's where their music came from. I want to hold your hand. In fact, she saw the Beatles perform in Detroit in 1964 and the summer of 1966. One year later, violence broke out in the city. The casualties from this conflict have been arriving all night long here at Detroit General Hospital in the heart of the city. The summer of 1967 brought a defining moment in Detroit, a deadly clash between police and black residents.

19:5443 people were killed, mostly black, mostly at the hands of law enforcement. In a hundred places, Detroit is afire. The destroyers striking from as far as three miles away from this west side ghetto where it all began early this morning. Today, many describe that violence as the Detroit riots. Marsha Battle Philpott calls it a rebellion. You know, in 1967, you had the women's movement. You had the Black Power movement, the civil rights movement. You had the anti-Vietnam War movement. And you had veterans coming back into the city. You had the flooding of these cities with heroin. This was a time of extreme volatility, of social upheaval going on, and you also add intense police brutality.

20:47The inciting moment was a police raid on an illegal drinking club, July 23, 1967. Then tensions boiled over, leading to five days of clashes, shooting, looting. And Joe's record shop was in the middle of it all. I remember looking at 12th Street and seeing the smoke in the horizon, like, oh, my God. So what happened to your father's shop and the stuff inside? The next day after things had calmed down, my father allowed my brothers and my cousin and my uncle to go over there like a man's job, kind of. You know, let's go see what's going on. And that's when he learned that his store had been looted and that it was pretty messed up.

21:34In that summer of 67, several American cities saw social unrest. And in the aftermath, the presidential commission examined the events, linking them to segregation. The commission said America is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal. For the next five decades, Detroit continued to hollow out, losing two-thirds of its people. until the turnaround began in 2013. The city declared bankruptcy, wrote off much of its debt, luring investors and developers and people moving in, leaving wordsmiths like Marsha Battle Philpott to put words to the story. A part of the narratives that have developed about Detroit since it became a black city is that it's a city of ruins.

22:21And there is an entire sort of what they call ruined porn industry that cranks out visual narratives and images of that, rather than this remarkable phenomenon of these black people who came from the South, made a way here, and have held on to and really maintained some of the most spectacular neighborhoods in the United States. But, you know, now that we are having development come back to the city, now all of a sudden we can talk about all those wonderful aspects of the city of Detroit. Of course, the comeback story includes the workers who went there in the first place, including black working class Americans who went north to build something, and as Marsha Battle Philpott tells the story, never actually left.

23:31And I've got some more summer fun in store for you. As the days start to get shorter again and the last legs of summer approach, perhaps you're thinking of firing up the grill and enjoying the sweet heat. Well, if that sounds like you, you'll definitely be interested in resident chef Kathy Guntz' recipes for grilling. Indira took a trip to Maine to get the sizzling scoop. I'm going to try to show you how simple summer grilling can be. So I have a metal skewer here and I'm lining them with sweet Italian sausage that I've cut into pieces about three inches long. And I'm skewering them with fresh rosemary, then a thick lemon slice and some red onion.

24:14and I'm just repeating that over and over. Sausage, lemon, rosemary, onion, on and on. And the idea is that when it hits the grill, the rosemary is going to smoke and lend this herbaceous, wonderful smokiness to it. The onions will cook and get soft, but the lemon's going to kind of drip juice onto the sausage. And instead of it being a fairly simple sausage, it's going to have all these complex flavors. I'm going to put my skewer right on there. I'm not putting any oil or marinades or basics. All right, I'm going to cover that and let it maintain its heat. We're going to give that about eight minutes and then we'll come back and check it.

24:51You can find that whole conversation at hereandnow.org, where we're also following other stories, including another summer book club with friend of the show and host of The Stacks, Tracy Thomas. This week, she's chatting about the Odyssey. Here and Now Anytime comes from NPR and WBUR Boston. Today's stories were produced by Julia Corcoran, Sam Rafelson, and Emiko Tamagawa. Today's editors were Kat Welch and Micaela Rodriguez. Technical direction from Caleb Green, Matt Reed, and Nick Dussault. Chris Bentley wrote the theme music with Mike Moschetto and Max Liebman. Our digital producers are Alison Hagen and Grace Griffin.

25:33Here and now's executive producer is Alan Price. Thanks for listening. See you Monday.

25:42Thank you.