Why We Lose Time: The Myth of Multitasking
I’ve recently begun reading a book by author Judy Wajcman, titled Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism. The primary focus of the book is the phenomenon that, despite technology improving vastly over the past few centuries, becoming faster and better, thereby creating more leisure time, we in the West seem to find ourselves hurried and stressed about how much time we have just as much, if not more than, previous generations. Without delving into Wajcman’s argumentation, I would like to posit my understanding of this phenomenon. I believe that this disparity between our perception of free time (or the lack thereof) and the speed and ease of our technology has to do with the complexity of modern life. With this complexity I would include mass social media, over-advertisement, societal demands for education and experience in all fields of work, and other sociological experiences that every person in the United States experiences regularly.
I don’t want to suggest that Facebook, your local news, or people telling you to go to college are necessarily bad things. What is problematic are the stresses that these pressures have upon individuals. Every day, technology enables us to be bombarded with literally thousands of different pieces of information. Some incredibly important, others just bytes of data that can be lost just as quickly as they were gathered. But as our exposure to this data increases, our perception of available time decreases. We often times find ourselves making sacrifices of relatively important data in our lives to make up for lost time spent being exposed to unnecessary information.
Some researchers suggest that in 2017, the average individual was spending around 2 hours on social media every day. Granted, often times that time is spent doing other things as well: watching television, eating a meal, etc. What some people may not know is that this multitasking is actually making it more difficult for you to remember or retain any important information you were looking to gather during that time. I ascribe to the idea in neuroscience that the human brain is only capable of focusing on one thing at a time, and that we only perceive multitasking as a simultaneous thing because our brains flip between one focus and another very quickly. When we are exposed to thousands, hundreds of thousands, of different kinds of stimuli every day, it is only during brief periods of focus that we remember and retain important information from our day. When people have this feeling of having lost time, despite having done nothing necessarily time consuming, it is because our brains have just suddenly regained focus after a period of flitting between one (mental) task and another.
So, I believe that what millions of Americans may perceive as a “loss of time” is actually just an unfortunate result of constant exposure to mental stimuli. Even during times of leisure, people who would like to spend their time more efficiently will perform 2 or 3 tasks at once. But this takes a toll on your cognition, as you will have and incredibly difficult time retaining information whilst multitasking. You may watch a television show while looking at a news story on your phone. You may be thinking about your plans for work today while listening to a song you really enjoy on the radio. You may be studying for an exam while having a conversation with a friend about a sports game you both saw the day before. Odds are very high that only one of those two mental focuses, or only parts of either, will be retained, due to the exposure to stimuli. In short, with our focus divided so thoroughly throughout our days, we may perceive that our time is becoming increasingly limited
P.S. This explanation only applies to individuals who do have several hours of free time in their day, and who still feel very limited on time despite that reason.
For more information on Multitasking, here is a link to the Wikipedia article below:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_multitasking
