Why is it so hard to do my work?

In the modern workplace people are often required to work on multiple projects, often under time pressure and with changing priorities. The media often talk about "multi-tasking", in which people engage in more than one activity at the same time, yet much workplace activity involves moving from one task to another sequentially. New research by Sophie Leroy at the University of Minnesota shows that performance on a task can be detrimentally affected by having worked on a different task just before. Leroy proposes that this is due to attention residue, whereby a person is still thinking about the earlier task whilst working on the current one. More strikingly, the detrimental effect of attention residue does not only occur when the earlier task was left unfinished, but also when it was completed.

In Leroy's first study, 84 students were told that they would be doing two apparently different studies. The first involved attempting word problems and the second was said to be a study of how people evaluate job candidates but, having completed the first task the students were not actually asked to do the evaluation task. Instead, they were presented with a task specifically designed to measure the extent to which they were still thinking about the previous task. For the first task, involving the word problems, the students were allocated to one of four different conditions, whereby it was either possible or impossible to complete the task, and there was either high or low time pressure. Leroy reasoned that tasks that are finished under high time pressure should lead to less attention residue, because time pressure inhibits the ability to explore possibilities so there is less to reflect back on later.

This is exactly what she found. After having engaged on the word task, participants were asked to decide whether various letter strings shown on a computer screen were real words or not. Some of the letter strings shown were not words, some were "target" words that related to the first task, and some were "neutral" words (that served as a baseline measure).

The fastest response times occurred for the target words, except for the participants who had finished the first task under high time pressure. This indicates that in the other conditions the target words were already active in participants' minds, as would be expected if they were still thinking about the first task. By contrast, neutral words were identified more slowly.

In a second study Leroy had 78 students complete the job evaluation task straight after the initial word problems task, but without doing the lexical decision task. In the the job evaluation task the students were given 5 minutes to read four resumes (CVs). Then they were asked to recall as much as they could about each resume.

As predicted, the students recalled more about the resumes when they had previously completed the word problems task under high time pressure.

Leroy notes that in a real work context it will not always be possible to improve task performance simply by setting a deadline; a deadline needs to be a realistic one.

Further research should also examine a range of other factors, such as the degree of initial task completion (rather than simply completed vs. non-completed) and the individual's state of mind at the time of transitioning from one task to another (e.g. is the person at the peak of their concentration, fatigued, or in some other state).

Reference

Leroy, S. Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (2009), doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.04.002