Multitasking is harmful to productivity. This psychological strategy can help you limit its negative consequences

“You start reading this article, but an Instagram notification comes in and you take a look. Oh, look who liked the photo. You go back to Xataka, you go forward a couple of paragraphs and a sound on the TV calls your attention: what a bad ad! This… Ah yes, the article. One more paragraph, but someone enters the room and…” We have known for years that multitasking kills productivity, but unfortunately we cannot stop doing it.

That huge problem called multitasking. In recent years, research has not failed to confirm this: when it is not Stanford University pointing out that multitasking can affect our cognitive ability and cause memory failures is the University of Sussex relating it to all kinds of emotional problems such as depression, anxiety and stress.

In a 2008 systematic review, Penn State researcher Cora M. Dzubak concluded that the extra cognitive work produced by switching from one task to another alone causes up to 40% of productive time to be wasted. “A good part of the time is spent deactivating the previous task and starting the mental processes required by the new one,” Dzubak explained.

The silent inner voice. Interestingly, this is closely related to what is known as the inner “voice” or “monologue.” Historically, internal monologue has been considered a universal human trait, but in recent years we have discovered that around 10% of humanity does not have that type of relatively constant internal conversation inside their heads.

Researching the topic, researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder discovered that “internal monologue” played an important role in task switching to the point that, if they suppressed it with different experimental techniques, the costs of changing tasks increased in a very substantial way.

A potential tool. What Emerson and Miyake discovered was that the inner voice functioned as an “internal self-instruction device” that allowed the cognitive representations of different tasks to be recovered and activated. The next question is whether we can train that device to be more productive, improve in certain areas, or simply have a more meaningful life.

Ethan Kross, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, was convinced it was. “The inner voice is a multipurpose tool, like a Swiss army knife of life,” he explained to a couple of years ago. “The problem is that it doesn’t come with a user manual.”

Can our inner voice be trained? For Kross, the internal monologue, like most things in psychology, has a genetic and a relational basis. That is to say, there are substantial differences between each of us. So many that, as we said, there are people who completely lack an inner voice.

However, there are strategies to “program” this “internal device” to improve our relationship with it. Three, in fact, are the most studied by experts who study this. Melinda Fouts, for example, is a psychotherapist in Colorado who has studied this professionally.

Fouts advises start by changing the relationship with ourselves. What happens is that inevitably, as behavioral psychology has taught us, this also involves changing our environment.

How to do it? Although sometimes we have the feeling that our thinking guides our behaviors and emotions, the truth is that the relationship between these three elements is much more complex. The brain often functions as an echo chamber for what is outside: one that distorts, modifies, delays, or ignores the various stimuli around it.

Thus, according to Ibáñez Tarín and Manzanera Escarti, perhaps a central element is what is known as “self-instruction training.” That is, rehearse the conversation we have with ourselves in moments of stress that push us to multitask. It may seem trivial, even naive: but the evidence tells us that imagination training is very effectivealso in professional fields.

Image | Jonas Leupe

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