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Again and again, people just refuse to accept that cognitive performance has very clear limits, and that multitasking, skipped breaks and long hours are, at bes

Again and again, people just refuse to accept that cognitive performance has very clear limits, and that multitasking, skipped breaks and long hours are, at best, a total waste of time. And exponentially so, the more “focus-intensive” the work is. Why do we have this bias? Is it deeply wired in some sort of survival instinct?

ratherbefuddled 5y ago
> multitasking, skipped breaks and long hours From personal experience I think these are two very different things. Context switching seems to me to have a cost directly proportional to the complexity of the task. If it takes me 10 minutes to get the mental model of something sorted and then I'm interrupted I'll lose most of that 10 minutes. I can fire off emails requiring little thought one after the other with little cost. I find that working long hours/without breaks is completely trainable. I can do it productively for long lengths of time and the longer I do it the easier it gets. It's very tiring, and requires solid rest in between but it can be done and it can be very productive. The intersection of the two is impossible for me. Interruptions seem to accelerate the slowly building fatigue markedly. It's as though almost all the effort goes into getting the mental model sorted and staying there is relatively cheap.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  > I can fire off emails requiring little thought one after the other with little cost. So can everyone else, which results in the state of the average modern inbox.
  - ratherbefuddled 5y ago
    Yes, it's a sorry state of affairs. I'd escaped that sort of thing until recently when we started working with a client who behaves as though everybody lives in their inbox and sees emails seconds after they're sent. Explaining to them that I look maybe twice a day at emails was interesting. Slack is my problem. I'm trying to train myself to be disciplined but too many people treat it as synchronous.
RobertoG 5y ago
It's just that, from a evolutionary standpoint, the kind of work that we do nowadays, is totally unnatural. So it's not strange that we have chaotic behaviors.
throwaway823882 5y ago
Which bias, the bias to want to multi-task? It's not a bias, we're just stupid. We think we can do multiple things at once. And we can do multiple things at once, so our stupid brains have proof that we can multitask. The problem is that humans can't objectively qualify their own results without analysis, and we don't do rigorous scientific analysis on ourselves regularly, so we have no idea when something we do is shit or not. The only facility we have for that is comparison and pattern recognition, which is not rigorous analysis. If you don't go out of your way to compare your results as a multi-tasker to the cumulative qualitative results of somebody else doing two different things, you will never see that multi-tasking is worse.
RosanaAnaDana 5y ago
Puritanism?
loopz 5y ago
If only work was organized to avoid multitasking.
nicoburns 5y ago
I think what you say is true over the long term, but not so much over the short term. Need me to skip breaks and work hours for one day when I'm well rested. I definitely can be significantly more productive than usual. Problem is that it's not sustainable.
- Taek 5y ago
  Most coders I know have had occasional run ins with a rabbit hole where several days of their life got sucked into a single drawn out coding session with little breaks besides food, and had some of the most productive few days of their lives doing that. If you need me to do a three day sprint, I'm going to accomplish the most without any breaks and with very sporadic sleep. (typically when doing a multi day session my sleep happens 30-120 minutes at a time, usually immediately following me hitting a difficult problem that requires intense rumination)
  - athenot 5y ago
    I would much rather code for 3 days non stop and then take a 4 day break doing some outdoors activity. I think the "business hours" schedule is fantastic for meetings to discuss but terrible for creative work. The catch is than in many positions, one needs to blend these 2 modes of operation. Some collaboration, some deep work. Unless there's support throughout the organization, what ends up suffering is the deep work.
    - periheli0n 5y ago
      The problem is also that meetings and answering emails is much easier than deep work and therefore they are highly attractive procrastination pastimes.
      - yonaguska 5y ago
        Ugh. I find them incredibly draining. While if I can actually code for a few hours uninterrupted (this includes self interruption), I find I have so much more energy. Maybe it's the self congratulatory mind manipulation I play on myself when I'm productive. On the other hand, meetings that I have little stake in just exhaust me and derail my ability to focus for the entire day. This may be an ADHD thing though.
elmomle 5y ago
From what I've seen, multitasking tends to inversely correlate with how secure a person feels in their life. Multitasking seems to be driven (for me and those I've spoken to) by a sense that one needs to "catch up" or "get ahead". Dig a bit deeper and implicit beneath that is the feeling, "things aren't OK just as they are".
mrkstu 5y ago
Probably because work culture was originally not knowledge/cognitive based, and the expectations were based on human endurance of physical expenditure, which has different load bearing characteristics.
- laurent92 5y ago
  I’d rather say: On passion. Since I’m 13, I’ve always programmed in long stretches, by passion. It’s please to absorbe oneself into a problem and solve it. Not saying it’s healthy, just saying it’s rooted in our human form, not in workplace traditions.
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    Do you find it's easy for you to head back into work at 9 am the next day? I'll have boughts, but they leave me drained and needing to recharge. I can't do it consistently, especially if the work isn't exciting.
pizza 5y ago
We love to hustle
- vmception 5y ago
  People look down on the pursuit of money but appreciate the outcome For the person that decides to efficiently pursue money at a higher velocity, the sooner they finish it the sooner they can recreate their social circle with new people that only see the outcome I’m still around people that talk about gentrification and inequality, just from my penthouse apartment where they’ve mentally exempted me from being the very person they talk about
amelius 5y ago
> Why do we have this bias? Is it deeply wired in some sort of survival instinct? Dualism. Body is physical, mind is spiritual. Therefore, mind cannot fail. Or some reasoning along those lines.
slver 5y ago
We evolve by trying to be better at what is needed of us to adapt. So yes, it's literally wired in as some sort of survival instinct. And technically, if we keep struggling at it, over time (generations) we'll get better at it.
tshaddox 5y ago
Do people actually refuse to accept this? Are you sure they're not just doing something for a short-term benefit at the expense of long-term benefits? I don't refuse to accept that pulling an all-nighter is bad for my health and my efficiency, I just waited too long for a deadline and need to get stuff done by the morning. Likewise, I don't refuse to accept that a healthy diet is crucial to my health and wellbeing, I just really wanted some ice cream.
neurobashing 5y ago
it seems to me to be the white-collar version of the blue-collar "I have 14 jobs to stay afloat" thing, some sort of weird awfulness that a certain group has spun into a sign of moral goodness. Look how great things are, they work 3 jobs to pay the bills! Well, we only usually work 1 job, and we get paid a lot, so it's been spun until "look how many tasks they take on a day, aren't they great?".
rajin444 5y ago
I imagine it's a mix of: a) people are different. some people can grind more than others b) passion makes the grind easy. people passionate about a project can go harder longer, but expecting everyone to be passionate about their job is not healthy. this passion may appear or disappear depending on your task As to how to fix it I have no clue. That's hard.
icelancer 5y ago
>> Again and again, people just refuse to accept that cognitive performance has very clear limits, and that multitasking, skipped breaks and long hours are, at best, a total waste of time These studies are non-ergodic. I work best under long hours; have tried both. The real proof in the pudding is the fact that many of my competitors work "efficient" work weeks and get buried under the onslaught of hours I work. For surgical things like programming and software development, I'll readily admit that working 80 hours/week is not ideal. But for management and a wide-ranging entrepreneur, I strongly suspect the opposite is true.
- eloff 5y ago
  Maybe, but if you're running a company you basically are doing highly leveraged decisions. Making more decisions is not nearly as important as making the right ones - and being overworked is not conducive to that. Getting your sleep, eating well, exercising, seems more important.
  - eloff 5y ago
    I think you might get better results delegating more and reducing your hours. But you have more experience than me in this, so take that with plenty of skepticism.
nzmsv 5y ago
Because people with money don't care how many humans they burn through while building their empire. In the short term there are productivity improvements to be had, and long term the burned out components of the big machine just get replaced. Cue the counterpoints of "I love to hustle". Sure you do, until you come down with burnout, a mental health issue, failed relationship, etc.
bobthechef 5y ago
I really dislike reaching for these sorts of evolutionary "explanations". They're typically unconvincing ad hoc just-so stories with no real attempt at systematically establishing the truth of the various mutually contradictory claims. Evolutionary psychology is notorious in this regard. Instead, I will only add that distractability is emotional and moral in nature. When I feel uncomfortable, I will be tempted to switch to something else to relieve the discomfort. The inability to engage in self-denial is one reason for indulging the temptation (which is why fasting and abstinence are great ways to engage in self-denial and strengthen one's self-mastery; you can always spot a person's weakness by the passions they overindulge and which seem to control them). Historically, this inability to do without pleasure was called effeminacy and the inability to bear discomfort was called delicacy (the Greek μαλακία has been translated into either, I think). Sustained focus is toil and toil is uncomfortable and requires both enduring discomfort and relinquishing pleasure. Another reason may be related to mental health. Distractions and diversions become especially attractive when under duress.
kevingadd 5y ago
Ever since I learned that a lot of the standards for medical schedules, long work hours etc were set by a cocaine addict who believed it was natural to pull long hours (https://historydaily.org/cocaine-and-modern-medicine-a-twist-you-didnt-see-coming https://historydaily.org/cocaine-and-modern-medicine-a-twist...) it's really stuck with me. So many bad practices basically persist due to inertia and we all suffer for it.
- phobosanomaly 5y ago
  Medical errors kill around a quarter-million people a year. Third-leading cause of death. Anderson JG, Abrahamson K. Your Health Care May Kill You: Medical Errors. Stud Health Technol Inform. 2017;234:13-17. PMID: 28186008. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28186008/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28186008/ Medical residents are capped at 80 hours per-week making around $50k/year, and this is sold as some sort of breakthrough over the previous system where they were working well-in-excess of those 80/week for years during their residency. What is normalized in the healthcare system is beyond insane.
dkarras 5y ago
To me: If I'm behind schedule in important work, obsessed with a problem etc. NOT engaging with work feels a lot worse than working on it in reduced capacity. If I take a break, call it a day etc. my mind keeps working on it, I feel anxious etc. Working on the problem though, feels just fine. I'm just tired, but probably having fun. Also the "gambler" instinct is there. I have solved hairy problems when I'm tired (because when you are out of ideas, you tend to consider creative options) though it is rare. But you seek the "rush" of solving it, finishing something that will give you a "high" for hours after you leave the desk.
CountDrewku 5y ago
This is why set works hours for jobs that require more cognitive skills are silly. My brain is shot about after lunch until about 3-4pm and yet I'm forced to sit around and pretend to be productive. Yeah there are occasionally some low end tasks that could be done in that period but I'd be better off just taking a nap and zoning out.
bitL 5y ago
> Why do we have this bias? It's about the control in hierarchy. The more one is flooded with streams of work, the lower is the chance of threatening somebody or leaving for greener pastures (leaving to worse ones is more likely for an exhausted person).
Shorel 5y ago
I don't think it is just bias, as if changing a setting somewhere would fix it. There's no easy fix, like the pill in Limitless, if that's what you are thinking. It is more an energy management issue. The human brain consumes 20% of our energy intake if we are resting. And about 28% of our energy intake if it is performing some effort. And all this work also generates waste, which needs to be moved to the blood and this takes time.

ratherbefuddled 5y ago

> multitasking, skipped breaks and long hours From personal experience I think these are two very different things. Context switching seems to me to have a cost directly proportional to the complexity of the task. If it takes me 10 minutes to get the mental model of something sorted and then I'm interrupted I'll lose most of that 10 minutes. I can fire off emails requiring little thought one after the other with little cost. I find that working long hours/without breaks is completely trainable. I can do it productively for long lengths of time and the longer I do it the easier it gets. It's very tiring, and requires solid rest in between but it can be done and it can be very productive. The intersection of the two is impossible for me. Interruptions seem to accelerate the slowly building fatigue markedly. It's as though almost all the effort goes into getting the mental model sorted and staying there is relatively cheap.

sokoloff 5y ago
> I can fire off emails requiring little thought one after the other with little cost. So can everyone else, which results in the state of the average modern inbox.
- ratherbefuddled 5y ago
  Yes, it's a sorry state of affairs. I'd escaped that sort of thing until recently when we started working with a client who behaves as though everybody lives in their inbox and sees emails seconds after they're sent. Explaining to them that I look maybe twice a day at emails was interesting. Slack is my problem. I'm trying to train myself to be disciplined but too many people treat it as synchronous.

RobertoG 5y ago

It's just that, from a evolutionary standpoint, the kind of work that we do nowadays, is totally unnatural. So it's not strange that we have chaotic behaviors.

throwaway823882 5y ago

Which bias, the bias to want to multi-task? It's not a bias, we're just stupid. We think we can do multiple things at once. And we can do multiple things at once, so our stupid brains have proof that we can multitask. The problem is that humans can't objectively qualify their own results without analysis, and we don't do rigorous scientific analysis on ourselves regularly, so we have no idea when something we do is shit or not. The only facility we have for that is comparison and pattern recognition, which is not rigorous analysis. If you don't go out of your way to compare your results as a multi-tasker to the cumulative qualitative results of somebody else doing two different things, you will never see that multi-tasking is worse.

RosanaAnaDana 5y ago

Puritanism?

loopz 5y ago

If only work was organized to avoid multitasking.

nicoburns 5y ago

I think what you say is true over the long term, but not so much over the short term. Need me to skip breaks and work hours for one day when I'm well rested. I definitely can be significantly more productive than usual. Problem is that it's not sustainable.

Taek 5y ago
Most coders I know have had occasional run ins with a rabbit hole where several days of their life got sucked into a single drawn out coding session with little breaks besides food, and had some of the most productive few days of their lives doing that. If you need me to do a three day sprint, I'm going to accomplish the most without any breaks and with very sporadic sleep. (typically when doing a multi day session my sleep happens 30-120 minutes at a time, usually immediately following me hitting a difficult problem that requires intense rumination)
- athenot 5y ago
  I would much rather code for 3 days non stop and then take a 4 day break doing some outdoors activity. I think the "business hours" schedule is fantastic for meetings to discuss but terrible for creative work. The catch is than in many positions, one needs to blend these 2 modes of operation. Some collaboration, some deep work. Unless there's support throughout the organization, what ends up suffering is the deep work.
  - periheli0n 5y ago
    The problem is also that meetings and answering emails is much easier than deep work and therefore they are highly attractive procrastination pastimes.
    - yonaguska 5y ago
      Ugh. I find them incredibly draining. While if I can actually code for a few hours uninterrupted (this includes self interruption), I find I have so much more energy. Maybe it's the self congratulatory mind manipulation I play on myself when I'm productive. On the other hand, meetings that I have little stake in just exhaust me and derail my ability to focus for the entire day. This may be an ADHD thing though.

elmomle 5y ago

From what I've seen, multitasking tends to inversely correlate with how secure a person feels in their life. Multitasking seems to be driven (for me and those I've spoken to) by a sense that one needs to "catch up" or "get ahead". Dig a bit deeper and implicit beneath that is the feeling, "things aren't OK just as they are".

mrkstu 5y ago

Probably because work culture was originally not knowledge/cognitive based, and the expectations were based on human endurance of physical expenditure, which has different load bearing characteristics.

laurent92 5y ago
I’d rather say: On passion. Since I’m 13, I’ve always programmed in long stretches, by passion. It’s please to absorbe oneself into a problem and solve it. Not saying it’s healthy, just saying it’s rooted in our human form, not in workplace traditions.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  Do you find it's easy for you to head back into work at 9 am the next day? I'll have boughts, but they leave me drained and needing to recharge. I can't do it consistently, especially if the work isn't exciting.

pizza 5y ago

We love to hustle

vmception 5y ago
People look down on the pursuit of money but appreciate the outcome For the person that decides to efficiently pursue money at a higher velocity, the sooner they finish it the sooner they can recreate their social circle with new people that only see the outcome I’m still around people that talk about gentrification and inequality, just from my penthouse apartment where they’ve mentally exempted me from being the very person they talk about

amelius 5y ago

> Why do we have this bias? Is it deeply wired in some sort of survival instinct? Dualism. Body is physical, mind is spiritual. Therefore, mind cannot fail. Or some reasoning along those lines.

slver 5y ago

We evolve by trying to be better at what is needed of us to adapt. So yes, it's literally wired in as some sort of survival instinct. And technically, if we keep struggling at it, over time (generations) we'll get better at it.

tshaddox 5y ago

Do people actually refuse to accept this? Are you sure they're not just doing something for a short-term benefit at the expense of long-term benefits? I don't refuse to accept that pulling an all-nighter is bad for my health and my efficiency, I just waited too long for a deadline and need to get stuff done by the morning. Likewise, I don't refuse to accept that a healthy diet is crucial to my health and wellbeing, I just really wanted some ice cream.

neurobashing 5y ago

it seems to me to be the white-collar version of the blue-collar "I have 14 jobs to stay afloat" thing, some sort of weird awfulness that a certain group has spun into a sign of moral goodness. Look how great things are, they work 3 jobs to pay the bills! Well, we only usually work 1 job, and we get paid a lot, so it's been spun until "look how many tasks they take on a day, aren't they great?".

rajin444 5y ago

I imagine it's a mix of: a) people are different. some people can grind more than others b) passion makes the grind easy. people passionate about a project can go harder longer, but expecting everyone to be passionate about their job is not healthy. this passion may appear or disappear depending on your task As to how to fix it I have no clue. That's hard.

icelancer 5y ago

>> Again and again, people just refuse to accept that cognitive performance has very clear limits, and that multitasking, skipped breaks and long hours are, at best, a total waste of time These studies are non-ergodic. I work best under long hours; have tried both. The real proof in the pudding is the fact that many of my competitors work "efficient" work weeks and get buried under the onslaught of hours I work. For surgical things like programming and software development, I'll readily admit that working 80 hours/week is not ideal. But for management and a wide-ranging entrepreneur, I strongly suspect the opposite is true.

eloff 5y ago
Maybe, but if you're running a company you basically are doing highly leveraged decisions. Making more decisions is not nearly as important as making the right ones - and being overworked is not conducive to that. Getting your sleep, eating well, exercising, seems more important.
- eloff 5y ago
  I think you might get better results delegating more and reducing your hours. But you have more experience than me in this, so take that with plenty of skepticism.

nzmsv 5y ago

Because people with money don't care how many humans they burn through while building their empire. In the short term there are productivity improvements to be had, and long term the burned out components of the big machine just get replaced. Cue the counterpoints of "I love to hustle". Sure you do, until you come down with burnout, a mental health issue, failed relationship, etc.

bobthechef 5y ago

I really dislike reaching for these sorts of evolutionary "explanations". They're typically unconvincing ad hoc just-so stories with no real attempt at systematically establishing the truth of the various mutually contradictory claims. Evolutionary psychology is notorious in this regard. Instead, I will only add that distractability is emotional and moral in nature. When I feel uncomfortable, I will be tempted to switch to something else to relieve the discomfort. The inability to engage in self-denial is one reason for indulging the temptation (which is why fasting and abstinence are great ways to engage in self-denial and strengthen one's self-mastery; you can always spot a person's weakness by the passions they overindulge and which seem to control them). Historically, this inability to do without pleasure was called effeminacy and the inability to bear discomfort was called delicacy (the Greek μαλακία has been translated into either, I think). Sustained focus is toil and toil is uncomfortable and requires both enduring discomfort and relinquishing pleasure. Another reason may be related to mental health. Distractions and diversions become especially attractive when under duress.

kevingadd 5y ago

Ever since I learned that a lot of the standards for medical schedules, long work hours etc were set by a cocaine addict who believed it was natural to pull long hours (https://historydaily.org/cocaine-and-modern-medicine-a-twist-you-didnt-see-coming https://historydaily.org/cocaine-and-modern-medicine-a-twist...) it's really stuck with me. So many bad practices basically persist due to inertia and we all suffer for it.

phobosanomaly 5y ago
Medical errors kill around a quarter-million people a year. Third-leading cause of death. Anderson JG, Abrahamson K. Your Health Care May Kill You: Medical Errors. Stud Health Technol Inform. 2017;234:13-17. PMID: 28186008. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28186008/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28186008/ Medical residents are capped at 80 hours per-week making around $50k/year, and this is sold as some sort of breakthrough over the previous system where they were working well-in-excess of those 80/week for years during their residency. What is normalized in the healthcare system is beyond insane.

dkarras 5y ago

To me: If I'm behind schedule in important work, obsessed with a problem etc. NOT engaging with work feels a lot worse than working on it in reduced capacity. If I take a break, call it a day etc. my mind keeps working on it, I feel anxious etc. Working on the problem though, feels just fine. I'm just tired, but probably having fun. Also the "gambler" instinct is there. I have solved hairy problems when I'm tired (because when you are out of ideas, you tend to consider creative options) though it is rare. But you seek the "rush" of solving it, finishing something that will give you a "high" for hours after you leave the desk.

CountDrewku 5y ago

This is why set works hours for jobs that require more cognitive skills are silly. My brain is shot about after lunch until about 3-4pm and yet I'm forced to sit around and pretend to be productive. Yeah there are occasionally some low end tasks that could be done in that period but I'd be better off just taking a nap and zoning out.

bitL 5y ago

> Why do we have this bias? It's about the control in hierarchy. The more one is flooded with streams of work, the lower is the chance of threatening somebody or leaving for greener pastures (leaving to worse ones is more likely for an exhausted person).

Shorel 5y ago

I don't think it is just bias, as if changing a setting somewhere would fix it. There's no easy fix, like the pill in Limitless, if that's what you are thinking. It is more an energy management issue. The human brain consumes 20% of our energy intake if we are resting. And about 28% of our energy intake if it is performing some effort. And all this work also generates waste, which needs to be moved to the blood and this takes time.