Surprise! There’s a Right Way to Multitask

Hi, I'm Nir Eyal, and this is the near and Far Podcast. This podcast is about business behavior and the brain. On this show, I do a few things. I read quick articles I've written about topics shaping your behavior. I interview authors of books I enjoy, and from time to time, I devote episodes to answering your questions. If you want to ask me a question, visit the podcast page on itunes, go to Ratings and Reviews, and ask me a question. By leaving a review, I promise to read it and possibly include your question in a future episode. So please ask me anything now. Enjoy the episode, and for more, you can always Visit me@nearandfar.com. Okay, Nick Gray, welcome to the near and Far Podcast. I want to help the audience understand why we're doing this slightly different format. Usually when I publish a new article, I have a wonderful voice actor reading out the text that I've written. And that's for a few reasons. We can get into that in a minute. But recently, my good friend Nick Gray, who is such a fantastic person, one of the things I love about him is that he is so helpful by being brutally honest about things he doesn't like, which is, you know, there's so few friends. That's how you know someone is a good friend. You know, a decent friend will. Will give you niceties and praise. A great friend will call you out and tell you how you can be better. So Nick sends me an email and says, I love your stuff, but this podcast sucks. It can be so much better. So I said, well, tell me how. And Nick says, well, you should add more personality to it.

Why don't.

Why aren't you reading the articles? And I said, nick, I hate reading the articles because I spend so much time writing them that by the time I have to produce the podcast, I'm just tired of it. I don't want to sit there and read it. And if I mess up, then I have to go back and read it again. It just takes too long. I'm not interested. So he says, well, I got an idea. Why don't we talk through one of these articles together and I'll read it and we can have a conversation about the article. And I said, well, let's give it a shot. So we have no idea what we're doing. We've never done this before. But for those of you listening, you get to experience this in real time to see if this is any good. Should be fun regardless, because Nick is such a fun guy to talk to. So, Nick, welcome to the show.

Thank you for Having me. I'm excited to talk about your new article. Surprise. There's a right way to multitask. Should I just get into it? So what I thought that we would do is I will read it. And as I'm reading it to you, because you're listening to your own words, there may be parts that you want to jump in and add some context to for your listeners. And by the way, I didn't think your podcast sucks. I just love you and I love hearing from you. I just felt like it was a bait and switch and that's all. And so I said, let's just play around. Let's give them more aneer.

I love it. Awesome. Thank you. And I appreciate you taking the time to make this better. So thanks.

Cool. So let's get started. Surprise. There's a right way to multitask. Here's how to get more out of your day without overtaxing your brain. Everyone knows that multitasking destroys productivity, right? Haven't we all seen studies and read articles telling us that it's impossible to do two things at once? In some ways, that's true. The evidence is pretty clear that humans are awful at performing too complex tasks simultaneously. Generally speaking, we commit more errors when juggling many tasks at the same time, and we also take longer, sometimes double the time to complete the task. Scientists believe that wasted and decreased proficiency occurs because the brain has to work hard to refocus. Attention. I'm going to pause and check in with NIR thoughts so far.

I always like to start my articles by overturning an apple cart. I think there's a lot of misinformation out there and popular beliefs that maybe aren't backed by the science. So I. Yeah, so, you know, I like starting articles with, you know, you all think that this is the way the world works, but actually what I recently discovered is that that's not the way it works at all.

Cool. So we'll continue. However, bundling certain tasks is a great way to squeeze more from your day with little effort. You just need to figure out which ones to bundle. Lucky for you, I developed a method that helps you do just that. I call it multi channel multitasking. Understand your brain's multitasking limits. Before we can dive into what tasks can be done simultaneously, there are a few key things to know about the human brain. Number one, the brain has a limit on its processing horsepower. The more concentration a task requires, the less room it has for anything else. That's why we can't solve two math problems at the same time, the brain has a limited number of attention channels. It can only make sense of one sensory signal at a time. You can't listen to two different podcasts, one in each ear, without mentally tuning out one of them. We can only receive information from one visual or auditory source at a time. I'll pause to check in with Nir. How am I doing? So far?

So well. You know, one of the reasons, by the way, I'll let my audience in on something. So I'm dyslexic and so I could never read as much as you have just read without screwing up. So I'm super impressed that you haven't.

Fumbled even once as you thought about writing this article. Where did your want to share? Because I do the multitasking thing, I will literally have the news on and I'll still be listening to a podcast, thinking some way that I can absorb these two things at once. That's impossible.

Well, that's impossible because it's the same channel, right? It's the auditory channel trying to get information in your ears from two different sources at the same time. Now what you're probably doing, you're task switching. So you're focusing your attention on the news, then you're focusing your attention on the podcast and you're going back and forth and back and forth. Of course, that means that you're not going very deep in either. And if you tried to recall what you listened to, you probably wouldn't do a very good job of giving an in depth review of what you heard at the same time. But we're going to get into the solution here of how you can do it better here in a minute.

Nice. Okay, so that goes to point number three. That said, we are perfectly capable of processing multi channel inputs, something scientists call cross modal attention. It allows our brains to place certain mental processes on autopilot while we think about other things. In fact, studies have found that people can do some things better when they engage multiple sensory inputs. Some types of learning are enhanced when people also engage their auditory, visual and tactile senses at the same time. So under those guidelines, we know that we can't bundle two complex tasks, but we can't bundle tasks that require the same sensory input. But everything else is fair game. Wow. So are you saying that you could bundle audio and visual.

Exactly. So that's the solution. So that's the difference between what most people think is multitasking and what the solution is, which is multi channel multitasking. And so that's what we're going to explain here. Great.

Moving on. Build task bundles. Your brain may not have the processing power to write a report and listen intently to a conference call at the same time, but you can pair one of those complex tasks with a lower level task that uses a different sensory input. For example, a recent study found walking, even if done slowly and on a treadmill, improved performance on a creativity test when compared to sitting down. That, and the fact that walking improves cognitive function and productivity might explain why walking desks have become so popular. People are certainly capable of brainstorming ideas while walking one to two miles per hour, which is a great way to bundle work and exercise. I'll pause on this. Do you have any thoughts? I have a walking desk that I use sometimes. Yeah.

What do you think of it?

I love it. And yet I find that for deep focus work I need to sit down.

Yes, I agree.

Yeah, for deep. I love it if I'm doing something and it took getting used to, but it's great to add some movement when you live in the suburbs. But for really deep focus work, I gotta sit down in a chair.

Totally. So I used to have a walking desk. I don't at the moment because I'm living in a hotel, but when I used to go to an office I had a walking treadmill desk. And it was the best for email, right? Like quick, just respond to one email after the other after the other. I could spend an hour on the treadmill no problem. I'd get my four miles of walking in in that hour, just at a nice leisurely pace. But you're absolutely right, if I really had to think hard, it wasn't a great solution. But for light cognitive tasks, I thought it was awesome.

That's a great idea that I'm going to use tomorrow. I'm going to do my emails on my walking treadmill. Thank you very much. So let's continue. Likewise, stepping out of the office for a long walk while taking a phone call or inviting a colleague for a walking meeting checks off two positive things at once and multi channel multitasking goes beyond work. Cooking and eating a healthy meal with friends allows you to do something good for your body while also investing in your relationship. Listening to a nonfiction audiobook on the way to work is a good example of making the most of a commute while investing time and self improvement. Doing the same while cleaning makes the chores seem to pass more quickly. Sometimes one task can encourage us to do another, which is called temptation bundling. A super effective motivation hack. The term was coined by Katherine Milkman at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, who ran a study in which participants were given an ipod loaded with an audiobook they could only listen to at the gym. Those participants made 51% more gym visits than those in the control group. Thoughts from near yeah, so this is.

A technique that I use all the time, actually. Sorry, I don't want to give it away. Keep reading.

I take advantage of temptation bundling by only allowing myself to listen to my saved articles using the Pocket app with its text to speech capabilities when I'm exercising or on a walk. Getting to consume those articles feels like a small reward and motivates me to work out or take a stroll again. Multichannel multitasking is an underutilized tactic for getting more out of each day. When we can build this technique into our schedules to help us make more time for traction and use temptation bundling to make activities like exercising more enjoyable. Hey, this is the near and Far Podcast. What you should do next is subscribe to my weekly newsletter. Get a free weekly update on my latest research, writing and best articles I find each week. Subscribe@nearandfar.com that's how I do.

That was beautiful, Nick. Amazing. Amazing. That was fantastic. So this was, I gotta tell you, this was a million times more enjoyable than me reading an article into the microphone. So thank you for doing that. You did a fantastic job, by the way. I wanted to add one of the things that, you know, I love about this temptation bundling and multi channel multitasking, this specific application of how I use it with the Pocket app, which I'm a huge fan of, I'm not affiliated with the company. I just really like the app is that, you know, I have a rule that I never read articles on my desktop, right? Because the New York Times and the BBC and the Atlantic and all these companies, they all want your attention, right? That's how they make money. They turn your eyeballs into money by selling it to advertisers. Does anybody not know that? We all know that. So the solution is to consume it on our schedule, not theirs. Because their articles are designed to get you down these rabbit holes, right? They're designed with clickbait that, you know, you start reading one article and then you look to the right and there's that other article and the other article and that looks like an interesting headline. So let me just click on that real quick. And even though you haven't finished the last article, now you're down this vortex of content that leads you to another article, another article and they will never tell you to stop, right? The New York Times or whatever publication, they'll never say, okay, enough, go have a life. So what I've done instead is by using this multi channel, multitasking this rule that I have in my life that I will never read articles on a webpage. I only listen to them while I'm doing something healthy. So taking a walk in the gym, something that moves my body, that's the only time I can listen to these articles. So the reason this is such a win is, is that, number one, I'm not wasting time on this content vortex online. Number two, I'm incentivizing a behavior that I need to do anyway, which is physical activity. And I'm making that activity more enjoyable because I don't know about you, I hate exercise. I've never really figured out how to enjoy it. But while I'm in the gym, listening to articles becomes that extra motivation.

I like that idea and it's encouraging to me. I've tried to listen to audiobooks more and I could do it when I'm at the gym, I can do it and I can link it to a positive reward. Is that something you said where you link the positive to doing something that is healthy?

Exactly, exactly. And you know, the same with meetings. So whenever I'm able to, you know, if we're recording something, I need super high quality audio. But you know, if I'm just taking a meeting or a phone call, I try and almost always take that meeting while I'm walking. Because again, this is multichannel multitasking. I can engage the auditory part of my brain while the physical part of my brain keeps me walking. So we can definitely walk and chew gum at the same time. It's not true that we can't multitask. We can multitask as long as we do it in the right way.

You are the expert on this. I want to tell you what I do for my walking meetings because I love to take walking meetings on calls. But I always notice that there's like bad background noise. When I lived in New York, I'd walk on 6th Avenue and you hear all the cars. So I got this headset. I don't know if you've ever seen me wear it. It's the number one headset used by long haul truckers. And it looks like I'm playing Xbox when I'm walking on the street with a big boom microphone that comes out in front of my face. But nobody can tell that I'm outside. Nobody can tell it sounds like I'm in an office because the background noise cancellation is insane and sometimes I'll forget.

No way. Even the streets of New York City.

It's still even in the streets of New York City. It's incredible. I'm looking around my apartment now to try to find it so I can show you. It looks ridiculous to wear, but it's so good. Wow.

You know what, though? It might be worth it for the extra physical activity. Although if you get recognized by a friend, you might be called out. But you know what we'll do? We'll put a link to this headset because I want to figure out what this headset is. I need one of these. So we'll put a link to it. For the. Can you get it on Amazon or is it some kind of specialty?

Yes, you can absolutely get on Amazon. It's called Blue Parrot. You have to. For that true noise canceling, you need a boom mic that's as close to your mouth as possible. And so that's the real key to this.

I love it. All right, so we'll put a link to that in the show notes as well.

Well, thanks for joining on the near and Far podcast, Everybody. Once again, nearandfar.com leave a review if you haven't already, for this podcast. Every single review counts. Near reads every single one of them. Thank you for listening.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the near and Far podcast. You can always find more at my blog, nearandfar.com and don't forget, if you have a question you'd like me to explore in a future episode, leave me your question. The former review for the podcast on itunes.