Multitasking is fake. Task-surfing — works for me.

Multitasking obviously is a fake. Daniel Kahneman proved it in 1973. Since then there have been more studies on a subject (Wickens in 2008; Just in 2001), and generally — no hope for multitaskers. We still do better when we focus on a single thing.

At the same time there is a growing problem with focus. As you probably noticed — our focusing abilities are going down. Facebook -> Instagram -> TikTok… I’m not even using TikTok to prevent mine from going further down. Joking, just too old.

Anyway, today I found a way to stay focused when I learn something. I just need to do several things alternately switching between them when I feel starting to lose concentration.

For me it was aha-moment and a truly new knowledge, but after 2 minutes of searching I found this study from Atsunori Ariga and Alejandro Lleras. They discovered this human feature 11 years ago. So, it’s obvious for them. They didn’t call it nicely though and no one did as far as I see.

So I’m inventing a proper name for it — Task-Surfing.