The myths and realities of military multitasking.

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In the last few weeks I’ve gone on a slightly coincidental binge of books and articles about productivity, focus, and deep work. These got me thinking (as everything does) about their military implications, my attempt at which is below.

The first of the books was Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus:

Hari discusses how large tech companies have engineered their software and even hardware (i.e. the phone you’re probably reading this on) to capture as much of your attention as possible. It’s a great read, and will make you rethink your relationship with the tech and social media in your life.

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For today’s article I’m going to start by talking about “deep” work in contrast to many of the less value added “shallow” work tasks we do in our professional lives. Then I’ll talk about how modern militaries both fail and succeed at cultivating this in their staff. Finally I’ll talk about what businesses and workers outside the military can learn from this.

“Deep” work requires uninterrupted focus

Multitasking is a myth. Anyone who thinks they can do more than one thing at once, or at least do these things well, is deluding themselves. I won’t bring you through all the evidence in detail here, but the books and articles I’ve linked in the text will provide an explanation if needed.

In short, they show that there is a small but significantly mental cost when you switch tasks. It might only be a few seconds, but it’s enough to prevent fully seamless task-switching. And when we think we’re multitasking (doing tasks in parallel), we’re actually doing tasks in small discrete sequential chunks, with a significant portion of time wasted through the accumulated task-switching effort:

The word “multitasking” is a relatively new one, originating in the 1960s to describe computers that could run multiple programs in parallel¹. In the ensuing decades, we’ve taken a concept meant for electronic brains and tried to apply it to our own brains. There are a small number of supertaskers who can actually juggle multiple mental loads effectively. Unfortunately, this small number is about 2 percent of the population, so chances are you’re not one of them: I most certainly am not.

In fact, I’ve come to realise that I can do one and a half things at the same time. The “half” is something physical and mindless: walking to work, ironing, hoovering, or walking the dog². The “full” thing is listening to a book or podcast, holding a conversation in person or on the phone, or thinking about a work-related problem.

But I (and I suspect most people) can’t effectively do any more than this. I can’t tune into a Zoom meeting or lecture while also sending emails. I can’t watch TV while replying to WhatsApps. And I can’t even think about trying to solve complex problems while using any part of my brain for something else.

This is important because, as I’ve written about before, military problems (traditionally, and, I would argue, to this day) are among the most significant and most difficult problems which humans face. They’re significant because the stakes for individuals are literally life-and-death, and can be existential for nations and regimes. They are difficult because the enemy is (usually) just as motivated as you are. So, with that in mind, how do militaries manage the attention of their members?

The myth of multitasking is manifest in the military…

First off, we can admit that militaries don’t always do a great job of this. In many cases they have bought in to modern mass communication technologies (e.g. email, instant messaging) with the same enthusiasm as businesses, while also maintaining organisational structures and SOPs³ that result in in-person tasking, maintaining desk phone extensions with an expectation of answering, and even using paper forms. When you’re deployed operationally overseas, or doing an operational duty at home, then you usually also have a second email to monitor, a duty mobile, and perhaps even a VHF⁴ radio. It can feel a lot like intern Ryan’s awful WUPHF idea from The Office:

Every ping, every buzz, and every phone call is an intrusion on your focus. No matter how quickly the interruption can be dealt with, the very fact of the interruption causes yet another task-switch delay and inefficiency in your mental process.

The only positive thing we can say is that some military IT systems are firewalled off from the wider internet. This is done for security reasons, but it gives an inadvertent boost to productivity. Unfortunately, the more “knowledge work” you need to do in your role, the more likely you are to need access to the internet, with all the distractions that brings. Cal Newport writes in detail about how all of the above-mentioned distractions kill focus in his Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, another of the books I recently read and highly recommend:

The epitome of the information and distraction-heavy military environment, which Newport would recognise, is the operations room / operations centre / command centre:

These rooms—which very much exist in real militaries, although are usually a lot less impressive—are where all of the real-time information of the unit, formation, or entire nation’s military comes together. In reality, this is usually a good way of monitoring and recording live information from the battlespace and escalating issues to the commander quickly. In film and TV, however, the focus is usually on the commander themselves taking decisive action in the midst of this chaos and distraction. We might justify this on dramatic grounds, but let’s put a pin in this and note simply that a place full of flickering screens, buzzing phones, and chattering radios is an awful place to make complex life-and-death decisions.

In reality, the “ops room” (military or otherwise) is a place of “shallow” work, where the wheels and gears of the great machine are monitored and maybe given a little grease. It’s a sort of institutional autopilot. Having said this, I often got the impression from military comrades that they were somehow immune from the human limitation on multitasking.

Everyone thinks they can multitask, and everyone is wrong on this count, but many military folk think that they get a special exemption.

“Ah, yes,” they might say, “That’s all well and good for civvies, but we army folk are different. We did special training, you see. We can handle many simultaneous demands on our attention⁵.” To which I would argue that just because you learned to put up with a drill instructor shouting at you while you did push-ups in the mud, in a respirator, doesn’t mean you’re able to compartmentalise your higher brain functions any better than the rest of us. But there persists a “get it done” mentality in the military which fails to account for the scale of the attention problem for “knowledge” workers⁶, and doesn’t protect the attention of their most useful asset, their people. Which is funny, because when it really matters, they have entire systems built up to do just this.

…but when it matters, focus can be a priority

The military has frameworks to protect the attention of its people when it really matters. I spoke about this briefly in my post on voice procedure and why you never say “over and out.” To recap slightly, there are “pro-words” which are used in radio communications which save time because the sender and received both understand that they denote a fixed idea. The most important from a focus point of view is “contact”:

The “contact, wait out” message allows the commander on the ground to focus solely on winning the firefight. As soon as he or she gets a chance, they will radio in a full contact report, but even this is a minute or two job at most, since they will use a standard form and many more pro-words to convey the key information quickly, before turning their attention back to the battle. The headquarters can, of course, reply over the radio and give the commander specific orders, but there should be no need to do this, unless HQ has updated information which the commander does not. As we mentioned before, the plans are made before the battle, not during it. The important role of the men and women on the ground is to execute these plans, and for this, they need to focus their absolute attention on the battlefield around them. Unnecessary radio chatter is a mortal sin in the military.

The structure of a military headquarters staff also serves to maximize focus for the people who need it. There are distinct staff officers and reporting procedures for administrative, logistical, and operational messages, so that the key information gets prioritized, acted on, and relayed to the commander for his or her key decision.

Another example of focus-maximizing behaviour comes from my own wheelhouse of EOD⁷. Tackling a complex IED⁸ can be a deep mental as well as physical exercise, and you will always have multiple demands on your attention, be it the operations officer ringing for an update or the local police asking how much longer you’ll be. These interruptions have the potential to ruin your flow, with potentially deadly results for you and others if you make the wrong decision in tackling the problem. Because of this, it’s not uncommon to hand over all your communications devices to another member of the EOD team with instructions to tell all callers politely, but firmly, to f*** off.

This focus on, well, focus, explains the importance given in the military to “gaining the initiative” or (if you like jargon) “getting inside the enemy’s OODA⁹ loop”. If you’re “acting”, and doing a good job of it, then the enemy is forced to keep responding to your actions. Reactive work is, by its nature, unexpected, urgent, and shallow. By contrast, planning the next step (while the enemy reacts to your last one) is deep work. If you have the initiative, then you and your staff have the luxury of engaging in deep work.

Military plans are rarely complex (senior officers are not rocket scientists, nor should they be), but doing simple things right is a challenge when you’re dealing with many thousands of people. Getting the plan executed is the complex part, and that requires a commander and their underlings who are able to focus: the commander on the big decisions, the staff officers on their individual strands of the plan, and the sub-unit commanders on executing their respective parts of the plan.

Conclusion: Can business learn from the military?

In my limited military experience, I lost count of how often some new piece of technology or way of working was proposed, often with the justification of “it’s how things are done in the private sector.” Of course military people should keep an open mind to new ideas, and never assume that their way is the only way, let alone the best way to do things. However, one should never assume that just because something makes sense in a for-profit business that it necessarily would work in a public sector organisation, let alone in the military, which can operate in situations far removed from what is familiar in business.

A deeper truth is that sometimes the new technologies and operating models of private business are actively harming productivity and creativity, so it makes even less sense to try to emulate them. This is one of the ideas of Cal Newport’s more recent book, A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload:

Newport argues that email’s rise in popularity was not planned around improving productivity, but was a sort of technological default, a path of least resistance evolution which led to the present-day office relying heavily on email and instant messaging such as Teams or Slack: the “hyperactive hive mind,” in his beautiful phrase.

If militaries should be careful about what they adopt from the business world, is there anything which business can learn from the military? There may be many, but I’ll offer a simple one around communication: learn to get by with the bare minimum of mission-critical messages between your key knowledge workers and their colleagues, at least during periods of peak focus. Responsiveness is greatly overrated in most workplaces, instead focus on results.

Cal Newport, in A World Without Email, gives a very telling example of George Marshall, the US Army Chief of Staff during WWII. He was faced with one of the most difficult problems in history: how to prosecute and win a war of unprecedented scale and complexity. Marshall reorganised his staff to minimise the number of direct reports to him, and empowered these officers to plan and execute their own responsibilities. His job was to be the decision maker, not to get lost in irrelevant details or tied up in how to make it happen:

Those who retained access to Marshall were provided a clear structure for their interactions, turning briefing the general into an exercise in controlled efficiency. You were instructed to enter his office and sit down without saluting (to save time). At Marshall’s signal, you would begin your brief while he listed with “absolute concentration.” If he discovered a flaw or something missing, he would become angry that you hadn’t noticed and resolved the issue before wasting his time. When you’d finished, he’s ask for your recommendation, deliberate briefly, then make a decision. He then delegated taking action on the decision back to you.

This is the antithesis of the busy operations rooms we saw earlier, and would serve as a useful model for a busy CEO, or any leader in business: put away your phone, close the laptop, and focus intently on one thing at a time. Because, as we ought to know by now, no-one can multitask effectively.

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading, as always. Please let me know what you think in the comments below, and don’t forget to like and subscribe using the link below, and share this with anyone who might like it. Until next week!

Featured Image: u/MGC91, The Operations Room of HMS Queen Elizabeth, from Reddit r/WarshipPorn

1. As the linked article explains, however, this isn’t true in a strict sense. The first multitasking computers could still only do one thing at a time, but they managed to break these tasks into small discrete chunks and do them sequentially in such a way as they appeared to be running multiple programs at once. The big difference between computer and human brains, of course, is that they don’t suffer any ill-effects from constant, rapid task-switching. In recent years, the advent of multi-core processors means that computers really can do multiple things at once. ↩︎
2. Although even this last one can sometimes take more than the “half” attention I’m talking about here. If I was a more conscientious pet owner, I would give it my more full attention. ↩︎
3. Standard operating procedures. ↩︎
4. Very High Frequency: basically, a tactical walkie-talkie. ↩︎
5. I’m paraphrasing, of course. No-one actually said these exact words. There are not nearly enough expletives, for one thing. ↩︎
6. This, by the way, does not break down along crude “commissioned vs. non-commissioned” lines. Many non-commissioned officers (NCOs, e.g. Corporals or Sergeants) sit behind desks all day and process information, whereas many officers (albeit more so the junior ones such as Lieutenants and Captains) spend much of their days in the field, training with their troops. Besides, in my argument throughout this article, I’m applying the concepts of attention and focus to all roles in the military, down to the humblest rifleman. ↩︎
7. Explosive ordnance disposal. ↩︎
8. Improvised explosive device. ↩︎
9. Observe, orient, decide, act. This is a framework for how decisions are made, particularly in the military. It originated with the US Air Force. ↩︎