As I write this post I’m listening to my headphones, my foot tapping along to the music. This morning while I was driving in to work I was listening to the audio of James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
. Wasn’t my brain doing more than one thing at a time? That doesn’t even begin to take into account all of the other things my brain was working on at those moments.
Is that not multitasking?
I learned this great trick from a teacher of mine; when you can’t think of something (you know when you’re in a conversation and you forget the name of a book or something) say “I’ll think of it,” instead of “I can’t remember it,” and then move on and you’ll be surprised how often you’ll remember it. You’re telling your brain to keep looking for it instead of admitting defeat and giving up. This works because your brain is a problem solving machine. It is always working on things that are at different levels of consciousness.
Is this not multitasking?
Today Andrew McAfee wrote a post again raising the warning flag that multitasking is bad. The impetus for this post was the disturbing fact that Nick Carr’s book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, which is just a really long version of his article in The Atlantic Is Google Making us Stupid, is being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Save yourself the time and just read the article.
I’ve already written my response to Nick’s book in The Evolution of Society, Madness and Social Media, so I won’t go into all of that again but in general I am really tired of all the vilifying of multitasking.
What About Your Moleskine? Hypocrite.
If you go back and read McAfee’s post you will hear him talk about the importance of picking up a pen and paper occasionally and unplugging and taking time to reflect. Which is something I talk about frequently. As I write this (while listening to my music) I have my Moleskine and pens sitting next to me. I do not disagree with Andrew at all that we need to unplug and think.
I do not believe that always multitasking is a good thing either. Have I confused you yet?
There is a place for multitasking and a place for pen and paper.
I believe that we are capable of multitasking and we should explore this capability in ourselves. We should nurture it and expand it. I believe that the ability to multitask will become a mandatory skill set for knowledge workers and possibly for our being a productive member of society. But I do not believe that we should always be multitasking. I do believe that we should find times to unplug each day. I believe that some things should be done without multitasking.
But I also believe that by vilifying multitasking we are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The more posts I read about the evils of multitasking the more it sounds like fear mongering by those who are fearful for their place in societies future.
The very fabric of our society and culture is rapidly changing and that has effects on our psychological and mental development and capabilities. I don’t believe that any of it is necessarily bad or good, it just is. And that by fighting it or by just passively accepting it - or worse, not even realizing its happening - you are doing yourself the biggest disservice.
You need to be an active participant in your own evolution.
And for the anonymous commenters who are going to try and say that my post would be filled with less grammatical errors if I wasn’t multitasking when I wrote this. I promise that it wouldn’t. I’ve run my own experiments and even been tested by psychologists and for me listening to music actually helps. Yes, I work better with certain types of multitasking.
And why are commenters on grammar always anonymous?
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