Are We Attempting to Do Too Much at Once?

The Franciscan Monastery would seem an unlikely place for a modern-day multitasker. Soundless and serene, the 42 acres of Byzantine buildings, arched walkways and luscious gardens are a sea of tranquillity in bustling Washington.

But there, in his third-floor office, is Brother Sebastian.

The soft-spoken friar arranges three-way conference calls. While on hold he watches TV news, checks his pager and faxes letters to friends. Pretty much all at the same time, he also prays for families pictured on his prayer board.

Multitasking, says Brother Sebastian, 38, “has become part of our culture. It’s who we are.”

Call it what you will--multitasking, multiprocessing, doing tons of things at once. We have become a nation of jugglers. Out of necessity, yes, but also out of choice. After all, leisure time is for losers.

We gain virtuosity, of course. But what do we give up in the bargain?

We wake up in the morning, brush our teeth while reading the newspaper and taking in the “Today” show. We toss the twins into the Baby Jogger and run while listening to “Morning Edition.” We drive to work with a cup of coffee in one hand, a breakfast bar in the other while enjoying an audio book on the tape deck and yakking on the car’s speaker phone.

In the evening we sweep into the kitchen and see how fast we can mash buttons on the microwave, the toaster oven, the range and the refrigerator, while commiserating with cousins in another country while we keep an eye on the NBA playoffs while we bow-tie the kid’s bib while we dream of a vacation on a tropical island.

“We believe we’re bored when our minds are not occupied all the time,” says Joyce L. Gioia, a strategic business futurist with the Greensboro, N.C.-based Herman Group.

“We feel like we’re more in control,” she says, which is “very important to people in these times.”

Originally, multitasking was a computer term.

It entered the parlance circa 1966, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It meant the use of a single central processing unit for the simultaneous processing of two or more jobs.

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Mike Agnes, editor in chief of Webster’s New World College Dictionary, says that his dictionary still treats multitasking as a technical word, but more and more he’s heard it applied to human endeavors. “I’d like to see it around for a good three years,” Agnes says, before he includes a new human-oriented definition.

He should talk to Paul LeBlanc, president of Marlboro College in Vermont, who checks the e-mail on his Palm Pilot personal digital assistant while talking to colleagues on campus. “The velocity of information,” says LeBlanc, “makes it harder to process sequentially.”

As new technologies sling more and more data-stuff our way, LeBlanc explains, “multitasking becomes both necessary and reflective of our changing noetic economy.” By noetic he means the way our society thinks.

The former literature professor says: “Before the invention of writing, the most important intellectual skill you could possess was the ability to memorize. After writing was invented, however, our noetic economy shifted.”

But “what’s happened in the world of the Internet and information revolution,” he points out, “is that information is no longer linear. We live in a world of fragmented knowledge.”

As a consequence, “your ability to associate is more important than the writer’s ability to organize,” he says. “Our grandchildren’s brains will be wired differently.”

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Nicholas Over is a Germantown, Md., boy who just turned 9. These days, says his mother, Lauri, you’ll find Nick playing Pokemon on his Gameboy while watching “Pokemon” on TV while eating breakfast while getting dressed.

“The younger generation gets bored if they have to do one thing at a time,” says Marc Prensky, president of Corporate Gameware, a New York firm that marries computer games with educational content.

“It’s not that we’re choosing to be multitaskers,” Prensky says. “The technology has chosen for us. Technology allows us to be this way.”

In other words, ask not why we multitask, ask why not?

There is method, he says, in the madness that is multitasking. “We can be so much more efficient by doing lots of things at once.”

Or, perhaps, convince ourselves that we are more productive.

At any rate, multitasking is here to stay, Prensky says. “If we had to choose between learning to do multitasking better or going back to doing one thing at a time, I think we’ll choose learning to do multitasking better. Multitasking is good. We’re not going to go back. That’s the way of the world now.”

So what do we lose? Francine Deustch, a psychology professor at Mount Holyoke College, is not a huge fan of the multitasking life. “Women multitask all the time,” she says, “especially women in unequal relationships. They feel overwhelmed. The only way they can manage it all is by doing two things at once.”

Deustch took a survey of 150 dual-earner families. Her resultant book, “Halving It All: How Equally Shared Parenting Works,” was published in April. She asked people about the use of leisure time--that is, when a person is not at a paid job or doing anything for his family. A lot of women didn’t even seem to understand the meaning of the word “leisure,” Deustch says. They asked questions like: Does it count if I’m talking to my friend on the phone while I’m washing the dishes?

When the work is shared in the home, Deustch says, “there is less need for multitasking. Women are the ones who are suffering.”

She also worries about wider ramifications. Multitasking “limits our social interactions in the world,” she says.

Right she is. Multitasking is pretty much a solo act.

“You’re so alone,” says Deustch. “You’re disconnected from self. Focused on all these tasks, it’s a very disconnecting way to be.”

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The mind is mightier than many people realize, says William Calvin, a University of Washington professor who’s written nine books on the evolution of the brain.

Calvin is slightly skeptical of the idea of multitasking. “There are various studies showing that when people claim to be doing two things at once, actually they are flickering back and forth, from one thing to another.”

On the other hand, he says, “I think it’s quite possible to be doing many things at once.”

The classic multitasker, however, is not to be confused with the pluperfect polymath--the Renaissance mind.

“There was a widening sense during the Renaissance of what an educated and expert person should know,” says Jo Ann Moran Cruz, associate professor and chairman of the Georgetown University history department.

The prototypal Renaissance men, Cruz says, “took as their field of interest everything ranging from philosophy and theology to art and architecture. And they were very proud of their physical prowess.”

Cruz says: “Implicit in the Renaissance model, there is an elitism. You had to have enough wealth and economic stability that you could pursue these things as part of a leisured life.”

Multitasking “is something else,” says Cruz, who is the prime example of a multitasker--teacher, mother, wife, community activist and department chair.

A parade of prominent polymathic Americans has pursued various and sundry interests. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, possessed a wonderfully diverse mind, says Dan Jordan, director of Monticello. “He kept books all over the house. While he was waiting for a guest, or even people to come to the dinner table, he was reading.”

Jefferson also invented a letter-writing machine that enabled him to write a letter and simultaneously get a copy of it. But as far as Jordan knows, Jefferson did these things sequentially. Not contemporaneously.

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As administrator of the health clinic, Brother Sebastian is constantly besieged by needy people--folks looking for a doctor or rent assistance or “funds for this and that.” He must deal with the 35 or so e-mails on the Web site every day. The faxes, the beeper, the call-waiting.

But, he says, he always makes sure that prayer and worship are among the tasks he’s juggling. “Without the spiritual dimension,” he says, “I couldn’t do multitasking. That allows me to recharge my batteries. It takes discipline.”

Multitasking, Brother Sebastian says, makes him feel as if his brain is “split in a thousand different ways.”

Looking out on the lovely green monastery gardens and the blue sky beyond, he pauses for a moment. “Multitasking does take a toll,” he says. “Sometimes I feel older than I am.”