Multitasking is a lifesaver.
It’s what enables us to deal with multiple threats at the same time, while also plodding our way out of the valley of predators.
There’s a price to pay, to be sure – a price in cognitive overhead, a price in degraded performance. But, we don’t notice the degradation.
Our cognitive system copes gracefully, slowly getting dumber with each new demand. But it doesn’t come to a crashing halt because of the addition of one more task, regardless of how many balls we already have in the air.
Imagine what it would be like if you’re facing one threat, say a lion approaching, and suddenly you face a second threat, say, a rustle in the bushes behind you. And bam! You’re out cold, passed out while your systems reboot.
That would not be good.
Still, multitasking involves repeated context switching, and the overhead quickly adds up. There’s a time and a place for multitasking, and when life-and-death is not hanging in the balance, it’s usually not justified.
Each time you have to interrupt the task at hand to answer a phone call or email, a question or a thought, working memory bleeds performance in the form of overhead. Pretty soon, a substantial portion of cognitive resources are tied up in the internal bookkeeping of these context switches.
By then, you’ve already shot yourself in the foot.
And you don’t even realize it.
As more resources of working memory are tied up in the bookkeeping overhead, fewer resources are available to think through what we’re doing – less ability to consider problems deeply, to reach into the recesses of the mind, to tap existing wisdom, to be creative, or to sew new information into the fabric of existing knowledge.
So, how do we ensure a high level of performance from our cognitive systems? How to make sure that as we do more things, we do them deeply enough?
For that, we need to do some bundling.
