Multitasking is a total nonsense, we’re told. People who think they can do several things at once do none of them well, and the good old empirical evidence gets piled up by folks doing a bad Wolf Blitzer impression to slaughter any dissent on the matter. Yet my 14-year old daughter, who has a prolific portfolio of art and animation, several IM friends who she is in regular contact with, and a prolific knowledge of several areas of particular interest to her, plus a reasonably good Grade 9’s knowledge of the theory and precedents that influenced her special interest sources.
I clearly remember my first university psychology course, held in one of those giant tiered lecture theatres. The professor (way up there in the heirarchy of that most bat-like of the academic genres—is it a science, or is it a humanities field?) told all three hundred or so of us that “If we listened to the radio or watched TV while we studied, we could not be efficient” students, people simply couldn’t do two or more things as well as focusing on one thing. This was his opening sentence to this freshman class, positing that the habits (I presume) we would apply to learning would not be optimal. The ghost of Henny Youngman would have asked “as efficient as what?” which means that ghost is hovering over the dividing line between scientists/engineers and artists/crafters.
I’ll go with the notion that when something REALLY needs to get done in a short amount of time, the best approach is to narrowly focus on that task, excluding all other distractions. Top-down planners try to do this by managing the environment where the task is performed. Really strong willed people (ninjas, yogis and other extremely disciplined minds) can simply block out all the extraneous clutter trying to muscle in on the required senses.
Most of us will fall somewhere in between these two poles; stark, hateful prisons end up building a feedback loop of loathing, making the task harder, and the intense focus possible with sufficient force of will is really a byproduct (or side-effect) of brain-washing. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing; how else do we get really good at anything?
What people who focus on the headlines only tend to miss is that EVERYONE is somewhere on the ADD—ASD (autism spectrum disorder) scale, and where we are changes as we change. Daily, hourly, whatever the rythym of our existence demands, will slide that controller on our respective widecast/narrowcast focus to suit the task or activity at hand. Sure, they’re time-slicing, but isn’t that what always happens? Isn’t what’s really going on just the definition of what constitutes an efficient “unit” of work?
So, when the “experts say” people are not able to manage multiple tasks, they’re correct to a point. When it really matters, and when the individual in question feels that it is important to do so, they will. The old models of time management still have relevance, but the laws of “time management physics” have altered slightly in this new dimension, so we’re still waiting for the new Galileos and Newtons to figure out the revised rules. Maybe that guy in front of you who is IMing, playing a game, ’shopping a new piccy for his DA friends and writing the latest entry for his blog is doing that research. Sure is annoying, isn’t it?