Before coming to academe, I worked in a research institute studying information technology. Looking back, the pace seems almost luxurious as I was able to concentrate on a single project at a time. Once I became an assistant professor, I found myself thrust into a very different work culture, with a dizzying array of duties competing for my time: research, teaching, grant writing, mentoring, committee work, and more. I was multitasking like crazy to keep up and meet deadlines.
Academic life seems designed to encourage multitasking, and at some point, professors must have thought that was a good thing. But is it?
Inspired by my experience after I joined academe, I spent the next 20 years doing research on multitasking and its effect on our accuracy, efficiency, and stress. My findings, as well as solutions to manage multitasking, are detailed in my new book, Attention Span.
Tenure requires excellence in research, teaching, and service — three interdependent factors that constrain one another to varying degrees depending on the type of institution. Putting more time into teaching means less time for your research; more time spent on service cuts into your time for course prep, and so on. And even after you secure tenure, as I discovered, managing that triple constraint is ongoing. Faculty members tend to shift attention throughout the day to meet the demands of all three criteria.
In short, multitasking is common practice in faculty life. Ideally, your research overlaps significantly with your teaching so there is more continuity and fewer cognitive shifts in your workday. But that is not the case for most faculty members who teach gen-ed, survey, and other bread-and-butter courses that touch on subjects well beyond our research specialties.
Multitasking is like shifting gears in the mind. Work becomes fragmented when you are switching from one task to another. You end up stringing fragments together to restore a common thread in one task. It is extra effort above what is needed to actually perform the task.
Many people believe that by multitasking you can accomplish more. But doing things in parallel is impossible if the activities require some amount of mental effort. You can’t pay attention in a Zoom meeting and answer students’ questions in a discussion forum at the same time. You may think you can, but when you try to do both simultaneously, what you’re actually doing is switching your attention, often rapidly.
Our research on workplace multitasking has shown that people spend 47 seconds, on average, on any screen before switching to another. And when you shift your attention, there’s a cost — the time needed to reorient to a new activity. Problems occur when you can’t leave behind information from the previous task completely (say, an upsetting email you just received from a student) and it then interferes with your concentration on the task at hand. It’s clear — based on years of research practices in laboratories and other settings, including my own work — that people make more errors when they multitask.
Multitasking also leads to stress. One study showed that a large contributor to faculty stress was work overload — a full teaching load, a lot of deadline pressures for grants and publications, and a lack of personal time. Decades of laboratory research have shown that multitasking can cause blood pressure to rise and is associated with physiological markers that indicate chronic stress. Research in the wild also confirms that multitasking is associated with acute stress.
When the demands on your attention exceed your available mental resources, you experience stress, which, in turn, affects your productivity. Cognitive stress makes it harder to concentrate, to generate ideas, to prioritize tasks. It becomes a vicious cycle. Female faculty members, in particular, experience the negative aspects of the triple constraint most acutely because they tend to spend more time on service work and mentoring students compared with their male counterparts.
Whatever their profession, most people are, by preference, monochronic: They like to work on a task to completion (or to a natural breakpoint) before starting a new one. Academe, however, is a polychronic workplace. Multiple demands and deadlines keep vying for your attention — research papers to write, service commitments to finish, tests to grade. While outsiders to higher education might think that you as a faculty member have complete freedom to set your own work schedule and time frame for doing tasks, the reality is that much of your schedule is driven by external deadlines, constraints, and requests.
The nature of polychronic work in academe is not so different from that found in many industry jobs. In industry a person may work on different project teams, supervised by different managers, juggling multiple demands. The key difference is that academics tend to work more irregular hours than our counterparts in industry, with many faculty members working in evenings and on weekends.
Meeting the demands of the triple constraint often requires such after-hours labor. You’re facing a deadline on a paper but have to stop to attend a committee meeting or hold office hours, so the writing work carries over into the evening. Academics often don’t psychologically detach from work in the evenings, but periods of detachment are precisely what is needed to replenish your attentional resources. An inability to detach from work can affect the quality of your sleep, and cause stress that spills over into your personal life.
While you can sequester yourself to concentrate on a task, you can’t turn off electronic communications for an extended period of time because there are people you need to be responsive to: students, research collaborators, administrators. When you’re asked for a status report on that article you agreed to review, you can only put off responding for so long.
The academic enterprise works best when faculty members act as good citizens. By ignoring such messages, you risk losing social capital, which can have repercussions on your career. Of course you could decline requests to review papers or serve on a committee but that puts an unfair burden on others (especially untenured faculty members who fear saying no) and the peer-review system depends on everyone doing their fair share. So you keep adding tasks to your repertoire.
All of which brings me to this: How can faculty members reduce multitasking and its consequent stress? What follows are some potential solutions, at both the institutional and individual levels.
Revise promotion policies to de-emphasize quantity. Many institutions still engage in the practice of bean counting of publications for merit reviews or tenure. Rewarding research based on contribution and quality of publications — and not quantity — can reverse the untenable trend of going after the least publishable unit. Rewarding the quantity of publications encourages people to divide up research results into multiple research papers, which fragments attention more than writing a single publication, and eats up more time over all.
A more comprehensive paper offers more benefits to the research community. When you present a more holistic idea of your work, your readers don’t have to knit together research fragments from different papers. Rather than shifting your attention among multiple projects and papers at different stages of development, working on fewer projects enables more attention to be spent on each.
Vary the proportions of the triple constraint. How much research, teaching, and service “count” tends to vary by institutional type. A common division at a top research university would be 60 percent (research), 30 percent (teaching), and 10 percent (service), while a leading liberal-arts college might have a 40-40-20 formula. Institutions tend to stick to their particular formula and rarely allow individual faculty members to change the mix based on their own skills and preferences.
Studies suggest that faculty members are more stressed when the promotion system emphasizes research and teaching as opposed to research or teaching. What if, for example, a research university allowed professors who excel at teaching to switch their emphasis to take on more teaching and less research? More weight in their evaluations could then be put on teaching performance and less on research and service. Likewise, research-oriented professors could reduce their teaching load and have more time to invest in scholarship and grant writing. Allowing faculty members to work to their strengths reduces the pressure to multitask.
Offer release time from teaching for more types of service, not just for administrative appointments. Many colleges and universities offer reduced teaching loads for professors who serve in administrative roles, such as department chair or associate dean. However, even service commitments with less responsibility — e.g., overseeing graduate admissions or running a search committee — still take up a lot of faculty time. Course-release time should be offered for an array of service obligations, including those beyond the campus, such as chairing a conference.
Streamline communications. A cultural shift in how departments and institutions send out emails would also help minimize distractions, from a “push” model of sending news out continually to a “pull” model of posting all communication in one place at one time, so that people only have to check it once a day. Such a shared information space could also help people construct a common thread in their minds as opposed to having to piece together information from multiple email messages.
Academic departments can also keep a wiki of departmental information to which all faculty members can contribute. In fact, such a wiki might even replace or reduce the frequency of faculty meetings. Professors could even post best-practices tips there on how to do monochronic work.
Organize how you interact with students. Emails with your students can also be reduced by structuring the communication chain as a hierarchy, and outlining how it works on your syllabus:
- The first line of communication should be an online Q&A site like Ed Discussion, where a student can pose questions to other students and crowdsource solutions.
- If a satisfactory answer isn’t found, then the next step along the chain is to contact the TA for the course (assuming there is one).
- The last step, or if a student has a personal concern, is to directly email the instructor.
Less electronic communication means less multitasking.
Plan, plan, plan. At an individual level, a lot of us could do much better at planning our workdays. Departments could help by designating a regular meeting-free day, to allow faculty members to work on project deadlines. Don’t forget to schedule breaks into your day. That is key to restoring your cognitive resources and reducing stress. Use that break however it suits you: Meditate, take a walk, grab a coffee. Do something that gives you a chance for self-reflection and contemplation.
Before you start on a course of frenetic multitasking, imagine how your current actions will affect your future self. At the end of the day or on the weekend, do you want to be relaxing and enjoying life with your family, or will you be experiencing the carryover effects from a day of stressful multitasking? The more concrete your visualization is, the stronger an effect it will have. Try and focus on one task to completion before starting something else.
While it might seem that faculty work excessive hours out of love for their profession, the research (and our own personal experience) disputes that theory. Studies have shown that, as the number of hours of workload increased, faculty members reported more dissatisfaction with their jobs.
The academic dream, for many of us, was to focus on research and engage in rich discussions with students. But pressure to excel in the competing demands of the triple constraint means that you risk not doing any of them well. By accepting that multitasking is a dead end, and finding ways to work monochronically, you may be able to rediscover what drew you to this profession in the first place.
