How sweet it is. I go to richmond and visit my friend at work, and what awaits me? Free biscuits and all the Killian’s I can drink! This may not seem awesome to some of you, but I can throw back a LOT of beer, so I’m on fucking cloud nine. The only downside is having to wait for her to get off so we can go grab some totally sweet grub. No biggie though, I read Time and laughed at how much has changed from two weeks (when the magazine was written) until now. Thanks to the internet, print magazines are all but obsolete to the likes of me. I know what’s happening in the world up to the minute. And not that dumbed down stuff on CNN, real news… News that can show you what’s really going on in the world. Time did have a rather interesting article on teenagers multitasking. While I’ve read about the phenomenon often as of late, something about the presentation this time around made me realize that it’s something everyone I know does. I personally have caught myself in the act and actually tried to analyze what I’m thinking at the time… Here’s my brief: When balancing multiple tasks, I first sort them using two criteria:
- Real time vs. My time
- Important vs. Trivial
Now for some definitions: Real time – requiring constant attention to prevent failure; e.g. Driving, juggling, video games My time – non-critical in nature, no time constraints; e.g. Typing, reading an article Important – needs to be done, high priority; e.g. Assignments, work, maintaining a conversation Trivial – Frivilous, unneccecary; e.g. Doodling, singing along How are these used? Well of course the realtime important tasks are done first, but in many cases, real time tasks can be trivial… For instance when driving, I’ll often be typing a message to a friend on my phone. Both tasks are rather easy to accomplish and the typing can wait for gaps in activity. Tasks on my time with low priority can often times be tripled or even quadrupled with little detriment, usually making the total time required less than the sum of its parts. The other key to my multitasking is the ability to "put my mind on hold," storing working data into my short term memory and not having to think of it until I switch back to that task. When the tasks are different categories of thinking, this is even easier: communication tasks work very well with objective tasks. An excellent example being having a conversation while assembling a puzzle… Different parts of the brain can be trained to operate independently for the most part. Combine this with putting tasks on hold for brief periods and you’ve got yourself an awesome recipe for doing four things at once! I don’t know if other people do the same thing, but I’d be interested to find out! Drop me a comment and let me know. UPDATE: just to let everyone know, I was pretty drunk when I wrote this one…