Multitasking

In How To Take Smart Notes, multitasking is treated as a productivity myth and a drain on focused work. Sönke Ahrens argues that what we call multitasking is not actually attending to more than one thing at once — “nobody can do that” — but rapidly shifting attention between two or more things, where “every shift is a drain on our ability to shift and delays the moment we manage to get focused again.” The counterintuitive finding from the studies he cites is that frequent multitasking not only lowers the productivity and quality of work, it also impairs the ability to deal with more than one thing at a time — the opposite of the usual expectation that practice improves a skill. People who multitask a lot rate themselves as good at it, but rarely test themselves against a control group.

The book’s constructive response ties multitasking back to the slip-box (Zettelkasten) method: we can train ourselves to stay focused longer by avoiding multitasking, removing distractions, and separating different kinds of tasks so they don’t interfere. Ahrens frames this not just as a mindset question but as a question of how the workflow is organized — the slip-box supplies a clear structure that lets us complete one task in reasonable time before consciously shifting to the next, making it “a haven for our restless minds.”

Context: Multitasking, in cognitive psychology, generally refers to attempting to perform multiple tasks concurrently; research consistently finds that the brain switches rather than parallelizes, incurring “switch costs” in time and accuracy.

Where this appears

• How To Take Smart Notes — multitasking analyzed as rapid attention-switching that drains focus, contrasted with the single-task discipline the slip-box enforces