Distractions are everywhere. Emails pop up while you try to finish a task. You remember that your taxes are due soon, but you are busy trying to meet a deadline. It often feels like we should be doing a dozen things at the same time. The temptation is to multi-task — answering your email while monitoring social media and listening to a presentation. Our brains do not work that way. For example, a number of studies have looked at the cognitive performance of heavy (media) multi-taskers (Ophir, Nass, and Wagner 2009, Uncapher and Wagner 2018). Those are people used to working with lots of distractions, permanently on their smartphones while reading on the computer and listening to music. Heavy multi-taskers thought that they were more productive than light multi-taskers, but they were wrong. Multi-taskers are less productive. The Myth of Multi-Tasking The problem is that our brains cannot engage in two cognitive tasks at once (anything involving thinking). Research has shown that our minds have a “cognitive bottleneck,” first described by Pashler (1992). You essentially work by iterating a see-think-move loop. First, you see stuff (perception phase). Then, you process it, think about it, and decide what to do (cognition or “central processing” phase). Finally, you do […]