Psychologists have found that people can only attend to a certain amount of information at a time. According to a 2004 TED talk by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Czikszentsmihaliy, that number is about “110 bits of information per second”.
That may seem like a lot, but even simple daily tasks are cumbersome on the mind. Just decoding speech, for example, takes about 60 bits of information per second. That’s why driving is so much more difficult when there’s loud music playing or when there are friends in the car, and why when you’re busy checking messages on your phone and your mom asks you “What did I just say?”, you have absolutely zero clue.
According to engineering professor Barbara Oakley, the co-creator of the most popular online psychology class in the world, “Multitasking is like constantly pulling up a plant. This kind of constant shifting of your attention means that new ideas and concepts have no time to take root and flourish.” Indeed there is a metabolic cost every time you switch tasks, which gradually wastes energy and drains your ability to stay focused.
Oakley’s secret to uber-productivity: do one thing at a time. Reduce and eliminate distractions like a madman. Never add to the current workload or environment until you are ready to move on to the next task.
Our ancestors were expert single-taskers. They hunted, gathered, cooked, ate, talked, and slept—always one activity at a time. They didn’t have Facebook, Twitter, email, news sites, blogs, or online forums to distract them.
From an evolutionary perspective, tens of thousands of years is an eye-blink. A sneeze. Not nearly enough time for significant improvements. You are no different than those who came before us. No matter what you tell yourself, you cannot multitask better than you can single-task.