You don't need productivity pills. You need to stop breaking.
How breaking the multitasking delusion dramatically increased my productivity
Every now and then, my brother’s work requires him to completely flip his circadian rhythm. For a week, his work starts at night and finishes the morning of the next day. Since we can’t shift our circadian rhythms on a dime, I’m sure you can guess that this really sucks. When you’re fighting against our diurnal nature, you’re not totally awake when it’s time to be awake, but when it’s finally noon and time to go to bed your body isn’t totally convinced it should be sleeping. My brother said the worst part about this is that it puts him in a terrible mood.
What’s the solution? Well, for my brother, a 7-day fast.
Despite the wrecked circadian rhythm, not eating anything at all allows him to keep his alertness up and his mood is far better. Naturally, there are times where by the end of the work day he’s barely staying awake but even then his mood isn’t affected too badly. Ironically, the fasting has him getting less sleep. Though, with only 4-6 hours of sleep most days, he’s more alert than the other night shifts where he’s eating food and getting plenty of sleep.
I too have experienced benefits to alertness and mood from fasting, but I haven’t put the mood benefits to the test by going on a nocturnal schedule like my brother.
In Upton Sinclair’s book The Fasting Cure, he’s explained that no, eating lightly is not the same as fasting. He tried on several occasions to eat a small amount of fruit instead of fasting but it would just make him ravenously hungry whereas with total fasting, hunger disappeared after a 3-5 days.
The point is that I’d argue that eating nothing is very different from just eating less.
Similarly:
・Meditating an hour a day for 60 days is not nearly as impactful as meditating 60 hours in one week.
・An extra long gym session where you rest 5 minutes between sets is not as good as a session where you rest 2 minutes between sets.
・If you’re offered a ton of food on one big plate, you will eat more than if you’re offered the same amount of food on smaller plates one after the other.
・Binge drinking more effectively wrecks your liver than daily moderate drinking.
・Your partner is going to be less satisfied with three 15 minute rounds of sexual activity spaced by 10 minute breaks than just having sex for 45 minutes straight.
Finally, you will be way more satisfied and productive if you focus entirely on one task for a long stretch of time rather than working the same amount of time with plenty of phone breaks.
Several years back I was taking modafinil to artificially enhance my focus. Though, once I fully grasped this concept and stopped teaching my brain to be scatterbrained, I was just as productive without the pill.
I’m sure most of us understand this conceptually but it’s very hard to get our behavior to reflect that we fully understand this. However, if you can understand exactly why this is the case then you’re much more likely to actually behave like you understand this.
There is a big productivity difference between working all at once, versus allowing even tiny breaks
To put this into perspective, let’s very briefly talk about a video game. Recently my friends convinced me to give the game Sekiro another try and it turned out to be much better than I remember. I sunk a good 25 hours into that game over about three weeks. While pondering how much time I wasted on this game, it had me remember something about productivity.
To simplify the game system a lot:
・To weaken an enemy you consistently successfully hit them or block their attack with the correct timing.
・If you block with the wrong timing too many times or too much time passes without you landing a hit, then the enemy will recover all their health and all your efforts will be wasted.
When you weaken the enemy enough with sustained aggression, a red dot appears and you can finally take them down by stabbing them in the neck. With only moderate aggression you can eventually get to stabbing them in the neck but it takes far longer.
In this analogy, the red dot is like the insightful ideas we’re hoping to generate, or like the ‘locked in’ effortless focus mode we’re waiting to flip the switch on, or even just the satisfying feeling of ‘wow I actually got a lot done today’ that quells that background hum of achievement-related anxiety. If you’re too timid to keep attacking your task at hand without a break then it takes a long time to get that red dot.
In the way sustained aggression is the key to victory in Sekiro, sustained attention is the key to maxing out productivity.
Task Switching is for losers
Working for 20 minutes, taking a 5 minute phone break and repeating 4 times is not the same as focusing only on your work for 1 hour and 20 minutes straight. Stopping your task and switching to another, which is termed ‘task switching,’ has been discussed in scientific literature for decades now. A 2003 paper titled Task switching reports that:
Everyday life requires frequent shifts between cognitive tasks. [Subjects were required to] switch frequently among a small set of simple tasks. Subjects' responses are substantially slower and, usually, more error-prone immediately after a task switch. ... It seems to result from both transient and long-term carry-over of ‘task-set’ activation and inhibition as well as time consumed by task-set reconfiguration processes.
Simply put, it seems that the brain needs to build momentum or ‘warm up’ for each task it’s working on. Then, when switching to a new task it needs to ‘cool down’ from the last task before it can warm up to the new task.
This task switching tax is called ‘attention residue.’ It’s like cleaning multiple litter boxes while cooking at the same time. You clean one litter box then you have to thoroughly wash your hands before chopping onions. Then you clean another litter box and then you have to thoroughly wash your hands before dicing the carrots. Your brain needs to wash itself of the previous task before it can fully engage with the next task.
For the longest time I didn’t want to acknowledge the things harming my productivity that are harder to measure. For example, I used to convince myself that having a tidy, well organized office didn’t yield any benefit because for example the multiple instances of spending a little extra time to sift through the clutter and access this or that file would add up to the same amount of time it takes to establish a system for organizing files.
Similarly, I think many people assume that there is a fixed amount of productivity you are capable of so whenever you are sitting down to work, you’re being productive. However, the reality is that you are much more productive 35 minutes into a difficult task than you are 0 minutes into a difficult task. You spent those 35 minutes warming up to and fully engaging into the task so more of your mental resources are available for it. On the other hand, from your brain’s perspective, if you get back to work after a 10 minute break of looking at Instagram reels, you’re more or less back at minute 0 and you have to warm back up from scratch.
Dr. Daniel Levitin explains that ‘multitasking’ is a myth. By doing multiple tasks at once, you are fractionating your attention into little bits and not really properly engaging on any one thing. He says that despite the lack of proper engagement into any of the multiple tasks you’re tackling, you’re still using up the neurochemical resources that we require for focus. So after an hour multitasking session, you haven’t made much satisfying progress on any one thing but you’re too tired to keep focusing so you come away unsatisfied and frustrated.
You don’t just multitask. You become a scatterbrained multitasker.
In 2013, Clifford Nass gave a TEDx Talk titled Are You Multitasking Your Life Away? where he explained that the top 25 of Stanford students were using four or more medias at a time. That is, while writing a paper, they were listening to music, using Facebook, watching Youtube, texting, et cetera. Keep in mind that was in 2013. Instagram barely launched videos in June 2013 and it would be another 3 years before TikTok was even launched. So the situation with students is much worse now.
Clifford Nass explained that “chronic media users pay a strong cognitive price” for this. Chronic multitasking didn’t just mean that they were say less productive on that one particular paper they were writing while doing all those other things. Nass explains that chronic multitasking “actually changes the way the human brain works” and that this is even represented in brain scans.
Nass’s research found that chronic multitaskers:
・Find it very difficult to filter out irrelevant information.
・Their attention is easily hijacked by irrelevant information.
・Their working memory is worse.
・They're actually worse at being productive on multiple things at once - they’re worse at multitasking.
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