Those darned kids and their multitasking

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Multitasking is good for some things...

but not for others. I'm also a natural multitasker, in that I get bored if I'm not. I can watch TV, listen to the radio, write a paper, surf the web, respond to text messages, and cook.

But none of those things require much thinking. OTOH when it comes to things like coding or trying to debug a problem, or proving a theorem (or reading a proof), I can't do much of anything else. I can have the TV or radio on, but once I go into the zone, those fade into the background. And I really dislike being interrupted -- it takes a little bit of time to get my context back and even then I'm sometimes not sure if I was tracking something that I forgot about (like I'll be debugging after an interruption and then realize that I was just about to turn on first-chance exceptions, but I forgot to after the interruption).

One thing I have noticed is that as I get older, when I am watching TV, I actually don't like to do anything else. I like to actually just enjoy whatever I'm watching. I don't have nearly as much time to watch TV, but I find I savor it more now.

A funny thing is that often young employees will tell me that they are natural multitaskers -- and then during a meeting I'll see them texting, reading blogs, sending email -- and I'll ask them, "So what do you think Tim?" The response 9 out of 10 times is soemthing like , "Oh... Could you clarify the issue?"

Posted by: DevStar   Posted on: 10/01/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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