The Cellar - Multitask or Unitask?

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Originally Posted by me

Moving from "unitask" to "unitask" too quickly or too slowly is a problem. When I get it right though, it looks just like efficient "multitasking".

Y'all seem to have missed the conclusion here.

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And let's not forget how long a woman takes in the loo/powder room...

I think it's all that wiping we bother to do. :)

About the only thing I can truly multitask on is talking--I can talk about one thing and do another with the greatest of ease. This usually manifests as being on the computer while I'm talking on the phone. A friend of mine has marveled at the constant typing and clicking she hears in the background, but she's specifically tried to catch me being distracted and it hasn't happened yet. But everything else, it's like others have said--I'm really unitasking in quick succession and being efficient with my time.

I've become much better at time management in the past year...it's amazing how much you can get done when you spell out what you need to do, focus on doing the most important shit first then moving on to the next task.

I think humans can multi-task, but it's not an optimal function in the end. I'd rather give 100% to do 2 things and maybe take a little more time than to do 2 things at 75%.

Some humans can multitask efficiently and some can't. You have it or you don't. I personally don't have it but I am able to shift my focus quickly so I can basically multi-task without actually doing it.

*sigh*

Keep trying, you pseudo-taskers. It just doesn't exist. I'm not the only one to say so, here are a couple of interesting articles that support my position that it's one thing at a time, round and round and round.

Meet the Life Hackers

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In 2000, Gloria Mark was hired as a professor at the University of California at Irvine. Until then, she was working as a researcher, living a life of comparative peace. She would spend her days in her lab, enjoying the sense of serene focus that comes from immersing yourself for hours at a time in a single project. But when her faculty job began, that all ended. Mark would arrive at her desk in the morning, full of energy and ready to tackle her to-do list - only to suffer an endless stream of interruptions. No sooner had she started one task than a colleague would e-mail her with an urgent request; when she went to work on that, the phone would ring. At the end of the day, she had been so constantly distracted that she would have accomplished only a fraction of what she set out to do. "Madness," she thought. "I'm trying to do 30 things at once."

Lots of people complain that office multitasking drives them nuts. But Mark is a scientist of "human-computer interactions" who studies how high-tech devices affect our behavior, so she was able to do more than complain: she set out to measure precisely how nuts we've all become. Beginning in 2004, she persuaded two West Coast high-tech firms to let her study their cubicle dwellers as they surfed the chaos of modern office life. One of her grad students, Victor Gonzalez, sat looking over the shoulder of various employees all day long, for a total of more than 1,000 hours. He noted how many times the employees were interrupted and how long each employee was able to work on any individual task.

When Mark crunched the data, a picture of 21st-century office work emerged that was, she says, "far worse than I could ever have imagined." Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What's more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.

A warning on the limits of multitasking

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"Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes," said David Mayer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan. "Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information."

The human brain, with its hundred billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections, is a cognitive powerhouse in many ways.

"But a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once," said René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University.

Marois and three other Vanderbilt researchers reported in an article last December in the journal Neuron that they had used magnetic resonance imaging to pinpoint the bottleneck in the brain and to measure how much efficiency is lost when trying to handle two tasks at once.

Study participants were given two tasks and were asked to respond to sounds and images. The first was to press the correct key on a computer keyboard after hearing one of eight sounds. The other task was to speak the correct vowel after seeing one of eight images.

The researchers said that they did not see a delay if the participants were given the tasks one at a time. But the researchers found that response to the second task was delayed by up to a second when the study participants were given the two tasks at about the same time.

Multitasking = unitasking, but losts of 'em? I'm not so sure....

Well, let's qualify that by saying /confessing that I get stuffed by multi-tasking because of the type of work I have to do. It's generally managing time-sensitive contracts involving ships - essentially ensuring that elements of the contract are completed at the right time as subsequent activities are dependent upon their proper completion. Alongside of this there are post contract activities which are drawn out exercises requiring detailed and painstaking analysis.

The idea is to create a gap to allow a clear and uninterrupted run at the detailed analytical stuff, but inevitably one or more time-sensitive issues do interrupt. The time seinsitive issues are not always thrown in your face though - they are communicated via email (so you only find them when you stop and check for new emails), or even not communicated at all and only reveal themselves as issues when you go searching for them.

Not a healthy mix and it can all too easily arise that on one single plate I have a half-completed piece of analysis, several fresh emails on different contracts advising that the tasks that should have been completed haven't been (or if they have then unsatisfactorily), and an innocent bit of investigating has uncovered another issue or two that shouldn't be there.

All to easy to try to nibble at them all, and in some ways that's what happens - after prioritising you move the chosen task as far as you can at that time, and then move on to the next one in line - so several tasks are open for some time - that's multi-tasking in my book and needs managing - I know which tasks I need to see completed first and they get the major amount of attention to push for a result/conclusion, but I must still see and get other high priority tasks moving towards a conclusion also. I cannot afford to devote time solely to one task from beginning to end without diversion.

I am good at multi-tasking, and I do know my limits.
Something that really ticked me off was that my old boss was slow and and uni-tasker but expected me to do three times the work she did (which I could do if I really pushed it). While she took frequent breaks while working on the same thing all day, she would ask how many things I had gotten done that day and would get short with me if I was only doing one thing.
After a while I told her that I felt it was unfair, she tried to stop doing it, but kept doing it when she got behind. Slacker.

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One day, please change your user title to Spider on Coke. Just for one day. Please?

(Maybe as a special treat for me on my last day here NEXT THURSDAY)

I shall!

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Originally Posted by BigV (Post 327592)

I buy your premise, but keep in mind it depends what tasks you're thinking about. Some manual things, like folding laundry, mowing the lawn, shoveling snow, require minimal mental input. Certainly you can do mental tasks, like budget, grocery, planning or trying to figure out where that squeak in the car is. It depends on the difficulty of the tasks.

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Originally Posted by BigV (Post 327592)

*sigh*

Keep trying, you pseudo-taskers. It just doesn't exist.

Hmmm..

you're a bloke, right? :lol: :p

Seriously, it does exist (trust me, I'm a doctor and I do it all the time :eek: ) and is a useful tool, but not for academically-loaded tasks.

I can easily fold laundry, use sign language to direct my children to get their own damn snacks and discuss swim team policy on the phone at the same time (and i will probably also wipe one child's nose, remove another's splinter and resort the recycling bin during that couple of minutes). But when I need to deal with the school's weekly scrip order, the kids had better have that video down quiet.....

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I am good at multi-tasking, and I do know my limits.

Stolen. Hey talk a look at my yard and house. Solid proof. :bolt:

I'm super at multitasking.

My boss growls that I dont look at him, so therefor am not paying attention to what he is saying.

Really, I am chatting on msn/yahoo, entering a finance application and listening to his barked instructions. I can recite what he said word for word with the same emphasis on the C word :)

Multitasking is a huge part of my job, even when I am not chatting on msn or reading the cellar.

Seriously though, I can chat on my phone, apply make up and change gears in my car...whilst sipping my coffee on the way to work :D

multi tasking: eating lunch, writing this post while listening to the staff out the front with a difficult customer.

When I first started my current job, by boss at that time (actually, coincedentally a friend of mine) asked me if I could do many things at once. I said "Of course, I'm a drummer."

But seriously, I define my tasks as Active, Pending, and Resolved. Active tasks can go in order of priority, but Pending tasks can't go anywhere until something else beyond my control happens. I suppose I could sit at my desk and do nothing until that thing happens, but that doesn't seem efficient to me.

I don't think there is really such a thing as Uni-Tasking, except in cases where someone was being very lazy and careless towards their job, taking the attitude of doing one simple thing at a time, regardless of whether this achieves anything other than killing time until they can clock out.

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Originally Posted by Flint (Post 328479)

...I don't think there is really such a thing as Uni-Tasking, except in cases where someone was being very lazy and careless towards their job, taking the attitude of doing one simple thing at a time, regardless of whether this achieves anything other than killing time until they can clock out.

Hmm..., suggest you don't say that out loud if you find yourself about to undergo an operation and are within earshot of the surgeon.