System 1: Bottom-Up Attention

Humanity has survived in large part because chemicals in our brains attract us to new stimuli. When seeing something novel, we receive—you guessed it—a jolt of dopamine. Neuroscientists call this bottom-up attention, and it's the first system of attention in our brains. Bottom-up attention seeks new and novel stimuli with a particular focus on finding pleasure (i.e., procreation) and avoiding pain (i.e., death). If you are in a jungle, the earlier you see a lion running at you, the better your odds of your buddy being food and not you. Your immediate needs are driven by system 1.

System 1 is great for survival, but it makes it very hard to focus. You can think of system 1 as a pile of kids in the backseat of a minivan on a road trip. Their sole mission is to avoid boredom, so they look out the window for fascinating cars or funny-looking animals, they play with toys and video game devices, and they poke and bother each other—all in the name of finding entertainment. As we go through life, this system of attention is always looking out for things that will excite us and that we want to go toward while also watching out for things that cause us pain, which we naturally flee.

System 2: Top-Down Attention

Lucky for us, there is another part of our brain that is devoted to planning. System 2, the executive control or top-down system, allows us to make active decisions about where we will focus. Our brain's second system of attention is centered on tasks or the desire to accomplish goals. You can think of system 2 as the parent in the driver's seat of that minivan, trying to get the kids safely and soundly to the destination. Unlike the kids, who only see stimuli as opportunities for pleasure or pain, the system 2 parent sees new stimuli in the context of her overall goal—will it help her reach that goal or keep her from it?—and she works hard to push away threats in order to keep focus. System 2 is what enables us to choose to wash our car, clean our rooms, and file our taxes (or at least an extension). Your future self loves it when this system of your attention wins.

The secret to effectively allocating our attention is knowing when and how to engage your top-down system and when to just let the bottom-up system do its thing.

The One-Man Band

Every workplace has self-proclaimed multitaskers. They type with one hand and scroll through their Facebook timeline with the other, all while talking into a headset on a conference call. They look impressively busy—even efficient. After all, they're halfway through 17 different tasks.

If only they could finish just one of them well.

These employees commonly don't recognize their lack of productivity and effectiveness. They think they're a one-man band.

Dick Van Dyke, as Bert the chimney sweep, literally is a one-man band at the beginning of Mary Poppins. Bert wows us by strapping on every conceivable instrument, from drums to bass, playing them all simultaneously before using his forehead to smash the cymbal at the finale. He may have lost brain cells, but onlookers break out in thunderous applause.

In a similar way, today's organizations applaud people who jump from task to task, always available, willing to drop whatever they're doing at a whim. We reward their ability to multitask. We even put it in job descriptions (these were taken from actual job postings):

• “Multitasking Office Rockstars Needed. We are looking for talented people to work in a relaxed office atmosphere.” Relaxed?
• “Multitasking Security Officer.” Hope the person they hired isn't writing reports while subduing a shoplifter.
• “Multitasking Administrative Assistant/Receptionist…who can handle multiple tasks at once, successfully. Attention to detail is a MUST.” Attention to detail? The ad shows a weirdly grinning man doing the job—with six arms.

As a leader, you might realize that this type of multitasking from your employees is bad for business. What you may not consider is that if you expect an immediate response from your staff, you are demanding it from them.

The Focus Savant

Novak Djokovic epitomizes today's hyperfocused athlete. ESPN once detailed the tennis phenom's brutal regimen.² He began each morning hitting balls, then stretching, drinking recovery fluids, visiting his trainer, getting a massage, strategizing with his coach, and doing yoga. All part of a day that included three 90-minute practices in front of an army of specialists who poked, prodded, and assessed the star.

Every aspect of Djokovic's life was monitored: diet, sleep, TV, even video games. He began emotional counseling, color therapy, meditation, and visualization.

And you know what? Djokovic became number one in the world, winning 43 straight matches and multiple titles from 2010 to 2011, including Wimbledon and the U.S. Open.

Many of my clients are pro athletes who covet the same kind of focus. They don't seem to have a choice. Their competition has never trained harder, eaten smarter, hired better coaches, or used more expensive equipment.

Imagine an employee who devotes that kind of focus to, say, expense reports. Charlene's one job is to study receipts: what's allowed, what's not, and whether her colleagues have used approved hotels and airlines. She can scan a receipt with 48 items and pick out the one illegitimate expense in milliseconds.

Charlene is also burned out—and this close to quitting.

What if an employee couldn't be reached at all during a three-week project?

“Where's Jason?”

“He's working on the Anderson account. He can't be disturbed—until July.”

Leaders who reject multitasking as wasteful slingshot to the myth of the focus savant. Eliminate all distractions, they reason, and productivity soars. This is not only dangerous during a fire drill, but it also ignores both our biological wiring and how most workplaces operate today.

Afterall, Charlene isn't Novak Djokovic, and it's unrealistic to expect her to be.

One Sphere (or Why You Can't Multitask)

Our brains can devote active focus to only one sphere of attention at a time.³ When people say humans can't multitask, this is what they are referring to. When we try to manage two active focus tasks at once, the results are pretty pathetic.

Two cognitive neuroscientists⁴ set up a driving simulator, and one said to the other, “I call frontal lobe!” (Get it? Front-al lobe?) No, but seriously: They had 200 participants navigate highway traffic while responding to cellphone questions about math and object categorization and then recall the items in a certain order. Each was a simple task when done separately. Three percent passed the test—a failure rate of 97 percent. Then there's the British experiment in which people who tried to juggle work with e-mails and texts lost 10 IQ points.⁵ That's the equivalent of missing a whole night's sleep and more than double the effect of smoking marijuana. Ergo, the question “What, were you high when you made this decision?” should be changed to “What, were you multitasking when you made this decision?” When it comes to true focus, we are single-sphered creatures.

We can't even switch between active focus tasks well. A group of doctors conducted four experiments in which young people shifted between activities like solving math problems and categorizing geometric objects.⁶ Every participant in the study lost time when switching tasks. The more complex the task, the more time they lost through switching.

Task switching isn't impossible. It just takes time to refocus whenever we're yanked into a different sphere of attention. And not all types of refocusing are the same. Glancing at a calendar pop-up or text—even quickly answering it—hinders us less than fully diving into a completely new sphere, for instance. However, the research consistently shows that whenever we switch our attention from one task and refocus it onto another, we lose productivity. Multitaskers convinced of their own efficiency should add up the time lost switching from project to project. (Of course, that would be another task switch.)

So why do we compulsively switch tasks, even when it hurts our productivity? The problem is with our old friend dopamine: Switching to a new task triggers a shot of dopamine in our brain because our brains reward what's new. Instead of experiencing the costs of refocusing, multitaskers experience the rewards of entertaining something new. Which, in turn, makes them feel productive.

It boils down to this: When we switch spheres of attention, our overall efficiency drops dramatically. No one-man band can justify that many wrong notes.

Mastery (or Why You Can Multitask)

But here's where things get interesting: Within a single sphere, the number of activities we can manage at once depends on our mastery and experience with that sphere. A professional drummer is a phenomenal multitasker—he has mastered his given sphere enough to free himself for other tasks within that sphere. He taps the bass with his left foot, the cymbal with his right, and myriad other drums using his hands, all at the same time. (I, on the other hand, lose rhythm by adding a toe-tap while clapping my hands.) The drummer can't do his taxes while making music, but within the sphere of attention he's mastered, he can do a lot. Recent research reveals that our brains are capable of handling a remarkable amount of tasks—if we get the timing and the types of tasks right. Marketing professor Steven Sweldens and two colleagues conducted exhaustive research that supports something each of us already knows: When we're “in the zone,” we can overcome distraction, extend our focus far beyond our norm, and accomplish almost anything.⁷

Autopilot: Multitasking That Increases Productivity. Our professional drummer can probably do something that's outside his sphere of attention—as long as it's something simple. You and I do this kind of multitasking all the time. It's like when you perfect a routine of chores while talking on the phone. You can focus fully on Uncle George's latest healthy eating advice because you're drying and stacking dishes on autopilot (and maybe on mute as well). In fact, combining one easy task (like listening to classical music) and one hard task (like financial modeling), can actually increase your overproductivity.

Inhibitory Spillover: Multitasking That Increases Our Willpower. In a fascinating study, Sweldens' colleague Mirjam Tuk found that people fighting the urge to go to the bathroom made smarter impulse-control choices (i.e., focused on a spreadsheet rather than flipping to WhatsApp).⁸ She hypothesized that bladder control fires up the brain's inhibitory network, which is tied to cognitive control⁹ (the part of your brain you use when you are actively deciding what to focus on). This is called inhibitory spillover—meaning when you resist one thing, it actually increases resistance across the board. It works like a vaccine. You give yourself a small amount of the virus, and your body is now equipped to fight a full outbreak.

Sweldens et al. followed up with a study in which subjects with a bowl of Pringles in front of them watched a muted video of a woman speaking. Some participants were asked to avoid looking at the subtitles. “Viewers who had been given the instruction ate fewer chips than those who watched freely,” Sweldens reported.¹⁰ This means that when you mentally work to avoid something, you are more likely to avoid doing something else you shouldn't do—like eat delicious Pringles. (Yes, I'm a Pringles guy.)

So, what does this mean for you? On the one hand, if you switch spheres, you sacrifice both time and quality. On the other hand, some forms of multitasking actually improve focus. It's all about what tasks are involved.

Full-Focus Tasks

Full-focus tasks can be done effectively only one at a time. These are activities like actively listening to a coworker present important financial information, writing that all-team e-mail about staffing changes, reading a book with an aim to actually remember it, or spending some quality time critically thinking through a problem you are trying to solve. Trying to do more than one full-focus activity at a time comes with a cost. This is what most people who refer to multitasking in a negative way mean.

Medium-Focus Tasks

Medium-focus tasks sit between full and light. This might be answering simple e-mail questions, scrolling through your Twitter feed, doing your laundry, or vegging out in front of the TV.

You can pair medium-focus tasks together as long as you recognize that, though you may be doing two things at the same time, you are not actually simultaneously processing any information. You are also switching between spheres, which means there are productivity consequences.

When you pair medium tasks together, quality and speed suffers. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, especially when the alternative to slow is not at all. When I'm on the road, I will reply to a ton of e-mails while having sports or a mediocre comedy in the background. I recognize I'm not actually watching most of whatever is on TV, but the occasional joke or highlight score entertains me, fulfilling my brain's craving for new and novel stimuli while I'm knocking out work I would otherwise avoid. In other words, switching between medium-focus tasks is for moments when the debate is between doing no work or doing moderately easy work that I don't want to waste my peak focus moments on.

Basically, I use one medium task to intentionally distract myself from another medium task that my brain tells me is painful. The audiobook I am actively concentrating on makes cleaning the dishes less miserable.

Conversely, some medium-focus tasks are categorically dangerous when paired together. For instance, if one of the spheres requires your vision to effectively operate a motorized vehicle, flipping to another sphere that requires you to read a text is a very bad idea. When pairing mental and physical tasks, the physical task moves from active focus to a region of the brain where autopilot runs. Autopilot is good when the task is predictable and easy. It is not good at dealing with the rare outlier (like a couch on the highway).

Task pairing decreases your likelihood of remembering anything. When you increase the inputs, you increase your cognitive load, which makes it tough for information to move from your short-term to your long-term memory.

Pairing also disconnects you emotionally from both tasks. Emotional engagement requires your consistent attention on a subject. If you are scrolling through Twitter while watching Game of Thrones, you are far less likely to care when (spoiler alert) Ned Stark dies tragically. You may have already discovered this and used it to your advantage—chatting with your friend during a scary scene in a movie, for instance.

Light-Focus Tasks

Light tasks, such as doodling or listening to certain kinds of music, can actually enhance focus by canceling out distractions and subtly stimulating the brain. A study led by Ravi Mehta from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign revealed that moderate ambient noise (like that at a coffee shop) improved creativity noticeably.¹¹ Sweldens et al. recommend such activities for staying in the zone.

However, different people react differently to light-focus tasks. They can be helpful or harmful depending on your brain chemistry and the tasks involved.

And no, listening to the top 40 isn't a focus enhancer. Stop it. Neither is having social media on your second screen. If the task requires you to hear and process words, it's not a light-focus activity.

Movement, especially in the form of exercise, however, seems to help. A University of Florida study found that people with Parkinson's disease improved their cognitive performance while riding exercise bikes.¹² Researchers hypothesized that “cognitive arousal” occurs when people gird themselves for a challenging cognitive task. Also, exercise activates parts of the brain that control movement. This arousal spurs the release of neurotransmitters that boost brain speed and efficiency, making motor and cognitive activities more successful. Many successful CEOs tout walking meetings, a great pairing of a light-focus and a full-focus task.

Multitasking isn't all or nothing. It's a matter of knowing what works (mastering a skill that frees you for other tasks) and what doesn't (switching between spheres of attention). Yes, you can answer a quick IM and get back to that report. No, you can't respond to 10 important e-mails and still contribute to the meeting. It's about, as stated from the outset, effectively allocating our attention.