Engineering gets it. Marketing misses it.

Awareness of this hidden cost is rare. But engineers get it. Others doing technical or creative work get it too. Most people, though, miss it entirely. So that means there is an opportunity here.

Multitasking is Expensive

It turns out that the cost of multitasking is actually much higher than people previously thought. It’s not only a problem doing disparate tasks at the same time — which efficiently reduces the quality of both — but it’s also a problem when you merely switch contexts in your head.

So, even though you may think you are highly focused on a single task, all it takes is a set of disparate thoughts to sweep you away. And even though you quickly switch back to your main task, you’ve already taken the cognitive hit without even realizing it. Think of it as a deeper form of multitasking.

This context switching in your head can be really subtle. We miss the significance of this because we are already used to flitting from thought to thought all day long. But context switching involves obvious and complex cognitive and neurological networks in your body, and the entire experience takes a toll on your ability to think deeply.

It’s well worth knowing about this phenomenon because it’s a problem that can be solved through practice. And actually, it’s more than a problem to solve. It’s also an opportunity to leverage. But just a heads up that although this stuff may seem easy enough to discuss at a conversational level, I can assure you that the solution is hard to implement — which is exactly why very few people can actually do it.

To get a sense of what I’m saying but from an expert, take a listen to this bit from computer scientist Cal Newport and podcast host Jonathan Levi. From the 20:22 mark of the video below, Newport explores what he calls the “Network Switch Cost” of an unfocused mind. It’s substantial. The section ends at the 23:51 mark. I keyed in the text below if you want to just read. It’s well worth a read and/or listen. More of my commentary below.

Jonathan Levi

People can’t do deep, creative thinking and work in 15 minute stretches.

Cal Newport

This is a crucial point that I think is worth hammering home. In the late 1990s there was a craze for what we can think of as pure multitasking. And that’s where you are literally doing multiple things simultaneously. So, I’m trying to write while my inbox is open and I’m on the phone. And by the early 2000s we all learned that doesn’t work. There’s really good research that came out of Stanford that was popularized a lot in the popular press and everyone realized, oh, if you’re trying to talk on the phone while you write you’re actually not doing either of those things really well. It’s not a badge of honor. And people turned off notifications, people closed down windows, people didn’t talk on the phone while they worked, and we thought, hey, we’ve done it, we’ve solved it, we now single taskers, we’re now really efficient.

But what they were missing is exactly what you said, which is that there is another price, another cognitive price that you have to be wary of if you’re doing cognitive work, which is the network switch cost. So if I switch what I’m paying attention to that unfolds and unspools a complicated series of neurological changes. Our frontal cortex has to start to suppress unrelated attentional networks and amplify related networks, related semantic networks have to get fired up, unrelated semantic need to be inhibited. There’s a very complicated neurological cascade that happens when you turn your attention from one thing to another and it takes a while.

And so what we are doing in the supposed age of single tasking, where we were so proud of ourselves, we say, look, I only have one thing open on my window, it’s Microsoft Word, I’m writing, I’m doing just one thing, I’m giving it attention, but then we quick check the email inbox. And we say, I’m not multitasking, I looked at it for just two minutes and I shut it back down again. I’m not trying to look at my inbox while I’m writing. But here’s the thing, when you switch to that inbox and you see these messages, most of which you can’t answer, some of them are urgent, some are from your boss so it captures you attention — that begins this whole cascade of network switches. But before that can finish, you bring your attention back to that Word document, and then it tries to switch back again. And those switches collide with each other and you have a neurological pile up on this cognitive freeway and the qualitative effect of this is your capacity to think is greatly reduced — and it takes a long time to clear this out.

And so what happened in this era is that people think they are single tasking, they are proud of themselves for it, but what they’re doing is these quick checks every 5 or 10 minutes — look at the inbox, look at Slack, look at my phone, look at the inbox, look at Slack, look at my phone. And they are focusing too much on the duration — I only looked at it for a couple of minutes — and they’re focusing on the fact that they close it after they’re done. But inside their head they have pile up after pile up after pile up. You’re trying to switch context back, switch to here and back, switch over here and back, and your frontal cortex ability to actually sustain concentrated attention on one target goes away. And now you’re working with a significant inhibition.

And this is why when I define Deep Work one of the key elements of it, it’s not that it’s hard and it requires hard thinking, but that you do it without any context shifts. And it’s the removal of those context shifts that gives you the superpower — not because focusing gives you the superpower but it’s because you’re avoiding the dampening effect of all the switches. By not doing the bad thing that everyone else is doing, by comparison, you seem like a Richard Feynman in a room of primary school students.

My Take

Ok, well I really like Cal Newport’s example above of Richard Feynman vs a room of primary school students. I’ll take that distinction any day. Wow.

I’ve worked with scientists, engineers, doctors, veterinarians, and people from a variety of different construction trades — many of them really get these concepts instinctively even if they use different terms to describe their experiences. The reason is obvious — they have to think deeply for sustained periods of time so they can solve difficult problems. Many of them also have to translate deep thinking into precise actions via their own bodies — think about building custom furniture, setting the foundation for a suspension bridge, performing spinal surgery, or coding a navigation system for an aircraft carrier. The people working these tasks really can’t afford to take constant cognitive hits that break their concentration. The consequences of failure are too high.

I’ve also worked with more creative types, such as writers, editors, photographers, and graphic artists. And they, too, tend to understand the importance of focusing attention without context switching because they are creating new realities where nothing existed before. Think of writing that 500 page novel while you sit staring at the first blank page. Or patiently waiting for the scene to develop so you can capture that one perfect moment on film. It gets pretty expensive to be messing around with email or phone calls or the idiocies of social media when what you need is time, patience, and precision. Musicians know this, as well, and I’ve seen them implement concentrated focus very effectively many times. Even children learning music — or any subject — know this and do it perfectly with proper training.

However, I’ve worked in other professions where this concept of task switching is largely unknown. Marketing comes to mind. I’m sure there are exceptions to all these examples, even in marketing, but after more than a dozen years working in marketing I’ve never heard this issue discussed a single time. And when I bring it up in meetings at the office or at group dinners on business trips, the room seems to go quiet. Most times I just let it pass and the conversation moves along. But there have been times when I pressed the topic and tried to get a discussion going only to realize moments later that I was just pushing string. I can’t think of a single exception to this experience. It seems that the consequences — and opportunities — involved with task switching as a topic of conversation really doesn’t go over well in marketing. So, I just gave up trying. It’s not worth my time. And I make no apology for the criticism.

Now, my judgement of marketing in this context doesn’t extend to innovators like, say, Steve Jobs, who for all of his obvious faults certainly understood the process of thinking deeply in an effort to create something entirely new.

And I’m also not saying that every engineer or every scientist gets the significance of task switching costs. On the contrary, I know many engineers who went to school for computer science or some related technical discipline and then moved into product management or marketing or sales relatively quickly after graduation. That’s common in Silicon Valley. In other words, they don’t actually do engineering any longer. Instead, now they do management or marketing. And, as a result, they tend to act like most everyone else in marketing rapidly bouncing along the surface of the daily task treadmill. It’s perfectly normal for these people to attend a dozen meetings a day — all chopped up into half hour or hour long pieces. No one can do real work working this way. Imagine an engineer coding in a kernel between meeting after meeting after meeting discussing unrelated, non-technical issues. It’s not possible. So, it seems to me that the work itself determines whether you are directly confronted with the costs of task switching.

It’s Meditation

What Cal Newport describes as a solution above in the video is pretty much the same as meditation. He’s applying timeless transcendence techniques to work. You’re much more efficient when you can think and work from a perspective relaxed concentration without the constant context switches that disrupt deep thought. In meditation terms, you focus on a single task (mantra, breath, etc) without distraction, and over time you transcend into meditation. Once you are down there you notice that extraneous thoughts (context switches) take you right back out of meditation and push you up to the busy activity at the surface. That’s why you are taught to ignore thoughts in meditation until they just go away — no matter how long that takes. This takes practice.

Sounds simple, right? Ok, try this. Get your breathing down to 1 breath per minute (30 seconds in, 30 seconds out). Measure your heart rate (use a pulse oximeter to track your heart rate and blood oxygen levels). It’ll likely be in the high 60s if you are healthy. Try to get it as low as possible (the 50s would work, nice and slow). Maintain this 1 minute breathing rate for a few minutes and try to keep your heart rate fixed as low as you can so you can get a rough baseline. Don’t move a muscle. Don’t think. Just follow the clock and breathe — 30 in, 30 out. Doing this is hard, btw. If you can’t do 30 in and 30 out, start with maybe 15 in and 15 out or 10 in and 10 out. Play with it.

But the point is that in this highly focused state you’ll learn real fast how some random thoughts or small muscle movements directly affect your breathing, your heart rate, and your concentration. When things get this slow and this intense it all becomes blatantly obvious that you can really only do one thing at a time, you can really only focus on one thing at a time. Focusing on a single task without context switching is what gets you into deep thought or deep meditation. Anything more than one incurs a cost. And it just goes up from there. That’s the “neurological pile up on this cognitive freeway” that Newport talks about and that takes longer and longer to clear out the more you stay up on the surface.

Implementation

I’ve tried to flush out why it’s smart to know about this cognitive network switch cost so you can work to reduce the negative effects. But that’s only part of Newport’s work. He goes into great detail about leveraging deep thinking to solve difficult problems, which is more about leveraging a positive effect. Now, I’m obviously a Cal Newport fan so I’m always looking for bits like this to try. If you are interested you may want to implement some of the things he’s talking about. There’s a lot there. You can’t do it all right away. Just start with one bit. Learn it well. Get some results. Get some feedback. Do some more. And around you go. It’s all very Agile.

If you like Cal’s interviews on the net, that’s cool, but you’ll soon discover that he’s smart enough to not mess with social media. And, yes, that’s a clue. He does his own podcast, though. It’s good.