There’s also a chance of inattentional blindness if I’m cooking spaghettic sauce for 3 hours, but I get your point.

And finally, I’ve walked out of meetings when I see half the room buried in their laptops or phones. If nobody can pay attendtion, I’m going to go do something else.

“But sometimes, context switches are necessary. My favorite example (as anyone who knows me would guess) is cooking. When I cook any meal of significance, context switches are required.”

Ok. But if you really had 3 hours to do nothing but stir and watch your spaghetti sauce simmer, you would have a far better chance of preventing it from burning.

Back to the business world, check your mobile device 100 times during a meeting if you must, but don’t tell me that you understood the meeting presentation as well as you would have if you left your phone turned off.

I agree that most people believe they are great multi-taskers, but in reality they’re not. What is worse is that you cannot convince people of the inefficiency of it. There’s a really good book called Brain Rules* that provides some heavy science behind the fallacy of multi-tasking and it was a wakeup call for me.

After reading that book and realizing how much I was losing to context switching I’ve been working hard to move to a mostly single-tasked environment. The biggest gain I found was when I moved from a multi-monitor situation to a single one. This allows me to focus on one thing at a time, and while it’s hard to measure I do find that I’m more effective than before.

In parallel to my quest for single-tasking I’ve been observing the shift in perception between people who use desktop/laptops and those who use apps on phone/tablets. I’ve found, subjectively, that people seem happier with their app experiences on devices and it got me thinking into why, and I think the lack of multitasking plays into it.

Without realizing it, people who have shown the strong case for single-tasking with the success of the iPhone and other touch-based phones… For 99% of people using one of these devices they ‘bite’ off tasks in a single-tasking way. They launch a given app, which is usually limited in scope compared to what they would use on their PC, and it takes up the full UI on the device. They accomplish their task (like check their bank balance on the Bank of America app) and then go on to something else.

The key thing here is that while in the single app, their mind is focused on just the information related to this one task. It’s not juggling multiple things at once. There’s very little if any context switching.

I’ve heard so many people say how much simpler the phone/tablet experience is compared to using their PC and I think the mostly forced single-tasking nature is a big reason. Now I know there is ways to multitask on the phone/tablet, but I think that is a minority case.

Single tasking, simplified experiences – where the apps are bite sized, makes for a perception of things being ‘better’. Add in the fact that on a phone/tablet you get to use a natural interface (touch) instead of translating movements through a mouse/keyboard and it further cements the perception of the devices being better.

*http://www.amazon.com/Brain-Rules-Principles-Surviving-Thriving/dp/0979777747/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344985984&sr=8-1&keywords=Brain+Rules