Actor Will Smith started out at the age of sixteen wanting to be a rapper. He and his friend dubbed themselves DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. He won four Grammys, even. But the IRS came knocking and opened the door on some financial irregularities. Smith lost much of that newly found wealth. That setback didn’t mark tragedy and it didn’t mean the end. He pivoted to acting and took the Fresh Prince to Bel-Air, with the success of a television show based on that same name. His film career took off soon thereafter. He’s won two People’s Choice Awards and has been nominated for two Academy Awards and dozens of others. Time magazine has named him one of the one hundred most influential people whose power, talent, and moral example are transforming the world.
Kendra Scott is the CEO of a fashion and accessory company that bears her name. She employs two thousand individuals, 98 percent of whom are women. She was named Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year in 2017. But Scott didn’t start with the stars aligned. She had only five hundred dollars, a spare bedroom to work from, and a mom who took calls on her company’s behalf. She threw her infant son into a baby carrier and went door-to-door at local boutiques trying to find stores that would sell her pieces on her behalf. Small orders were placed that offered enough cash to buy supplies to make the next round of product. When her oldest son was three and the other just one year old, she divorced, and now her family’s livelihood depended on her taking her business to the next level. She had to find a new way forward. Though a college dropout, she opened her first retail business, and it worked. Within three years, Oscar de la Renta chose her pieces to accessorize his line at a spring runway show. Scott now sits on Forbes’s list of America’s richest self-made women, positioned higher than Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Donna Karan, and Diane von Furstenberg. Her brand is valued at over $1 billion.
Setbacks might come in education, business, or personal life. They might come early or they might come later on. Regardless, they need not be thought of as failures to meet a goal; they can instead be embraced as opportunities to seek a new path forward.
Doing More by Doing Less, and How to Think Beyond Today
Looking to find time in my day to get more practice sessions in, I was doubling and tripling up. I found a fifteen-minute window when Pete was getting Mattie dressed for bed, before family story time. If I put the four-minute recording of “Your Love” on repeat, I could lay down three and a half repetitions in between warming the bottle of milk and tracking down Mattie’s nighttime stuffed animal friends. There were a few ten-minute pockets here and there, when I was waiting for someone to return a call, where I could try to remember the sequence of licks in the B-section. I could listen to the tune while writing this book, to try to figure out how the bass drum and snare came together. If I air-drummed in the shower I could log a semblance of additional rehearsals.
All of the ways in which I was fitting more practice into my regular day involved trying to add stick-time on top of what I was already doing. They were multitasking solutions. While they felt like the right course of action for getting more done, I knew they weren’t working. I recorded myself and listened back to what each session produced. Sure, I was improving. Yes, no longer did I look like an ostrich that was trying to fly but had yet to accept she couldn’t. But I was still quite far from talented.
Multitasking is a common enough practice. Well over half of the five hundred people I once surveyed reported that they preferred multitasking to single-tasking in order to accomplish the goals they cared most about. But scientists have discovered that preferences don’t match up with our real choices.
To get a baseline understanding of just how prevalent multitasking is in the workplace, a team of scientists led by Laura Dabbish from Carnegie Mellon University observed the minute-by-minute choices made by employees at one financial-services firm and at a medical-device company. They shadowed thirty-six managers, financial analysts, software developers, engineers, and project leaders for three days, following them around every minute of the day. With their stopwatch at the ready, the researchers timed how long each employee spent in continuous uninterrupted thought or activity before moving on to something else. They found that the average amount of time that employees spent on any single event before switching was just three minutes. Those breaks happened even more frequently when employees were working on computers, cell phones, or other electronics. Then, switching happened every two minutes or so. Of course, sometimes we have no choice but to pull ourselves away from what we’re working on—a boss stops by or a colleague has a question. But the researchers found that, just shy of half the time, the employees interrupted themselves. It was their choice to switch from one task to the next. These employees rarely granted themselves the opportunity to focus their mental resources on just one project for an extended length of time. Instead, the ping of a text lured some away from the spreadsheets they were working through. A notification flag popping up in the corner of a computer screen would tempt some to click for the update.
Beyond the Brink
There is a problem with this kind of divided attention. Pushed past a certain point, our cognitive resources become spread too thin to be effective. We have less mental bandwidth available to make good decisions that advance the multitude of goals we are working toward simultaneously.
Andrew Ward and Traci Mann, social psychologists at the time at Swarthmore College and UCLA, respectively, found out just how damaging multitasking can be for our long-term goals. They focused their investigation on the effects of multitasking among individuals who were dieting. In their experiment, participants enjoyed a movie depicting works by well-known artists. The show created the experience of visiting a museum virtually, without requiring viewers to battle the crowds or worry about knocking their head into one of Alexander Calder’s mobiles. This was pretty enjoyable. The other half was randomly tasked with an additional responsibility. During the movie, they were required to tap their feet as soon as they heard a beep in the room. They also had to memorize which specific artworks they saw, so they could pass a memory test later on. Was Monet’s Water Lilies featured? What about Rothko’s Black on Maroon?
In addition, everyone was invited to sample snacks like nacho chips, chocolate candies, and cookies as they visited the virtual museum. The researchers knew that this invitation to snack conflicted with the dieters’ important long-term goal. The question was whether multitasking would make it more difficult for the dieters to refrain from succumbing to the temptation. Could they make choices that would align with their health goal even when their cognitive resources were spread thin?
The answer was a resounding no. When dieters multitasked, they were more likely to make choices about what and how much to eat that they would later regret. In fact, compared to when they were simply enjoying the art, multitaskers consumed about 40 percent more calories from the unhealthy snacks, despite the fact that they were trying to watch their weight. The optional nosh became an almost automatic act that they couldn’t resist.