Multitasking (aka doing alot of things half ass all at once)

It has been drilled into all of us that multitasking is an effective and efficient means to get alot accomplished in a short amount of time. "Hi I'm Bob, I can multitask." "OK Bob, your hired. We need more people like you." What our pal Bob really means is "Hi I'm Bob, If you just let me hammer out projects one at a time, they would be done efficiently, effectively and without error. But, if I told you that, you would have that confused look on your face like grandma has when you try to explain to her that Facebook is not an actual book and you would not hire me." It may at first be hard for you to grasp even the slightest ideas that multitasking is counter productive. But that is to be expected since that's how we're programmed early on. So as always I am delving deep into the unknown for my faithful readers to find the origin and truth to lifes greatest mysteries.  As I bring you along on this journey, lets take the girl driving next to you this morning for example. She was driving, drinking a coffee, fixing her hair, applying lipstick and holding a conversation on her cell phone so animated and dramatic that it may have just netted her 2 Oscar nominations. Now if you are the girl I am talking about, thank you for also flipping the guy off in front of you whose not late for work (thats a plug to an earlier blog). Do you think her multitasking was effective and efficient? Two red light violations, lipstick on her tooth, some coffee spilled on her pencil skirt and a topsie tail malfunction. She did make it to work with the tasks sort of complete, but now you have to try to keep your eyes off her red tooth for 2 hours in that 'meeting just to have a meeting' meeting. (More on that in the near future) How the heck is it possible to keep your eyes off that bright-ass red tooth? Enter the inadvertent cleavage stare. (I am giving away way to much of my future topics here. But thats because I love you all). Next, lets think about the average office job worker. First of all it's your fault. You said "I am great at multitasking" in your interview, so as a gang member would say, "Blood in, blood out." It's too late for you now. Note how most office workers usually stumble on their words when someone asks them what they do for a living, often wondering what the hell the title of the job was in the paper when they applied. The most common answer is manager of something or other. This term encompasses doing a bunch of shit while juggling a bunch of other shit while answering emails immediately.  The title should actually be Shit Juggler or Poopyhands. Technology, the leading source if multitasking, does the opposite of what it was intended to do. Your life is now harder because of it. You see, just this morning my 'smartphone' said to me "Hey dummy, you have 22 apps that need updating. So for 45 minutes I watch it struggle to update all of them at once. The end result? I'm still rockin 'Mildly Upset Birds'.  Yes it's been so long since I have had my apps updated because of my phone's 'ability to multitask'  that I still have to spend the first 20 minutes of the game getting the damn birds pissed off enough to want to be slung across the air at the big green pig. Remember pre-internet? We used to only have to use the info we got from a 1976 volume of Encyclopedia Brittanica. Now we need to spend 96 straight hours researching every possible article ever written for any if our school or work reports. And where the telephone limited your communication throughout the day, email gives an unlimited number of people the ability to cc you on every single message they send, multiplied by 20 with all the 'ok' and 'thank you' follow up messages. You may even find yourself in a vicious game of email Tetris.  All those emails falling from the top of the screen needing to be read, sorted, replied to, rotated and stacked in different folder positions.  It's not that bad if you can find a way of tracking your high score. Now, since I am not one dimensional and value the luxury of keeping my job, I did look into the advantages if multitasking...sweetie, the tv isn't a chalkboard..and found that doing many....hey that green paper you just flushed down the potty was the rent money...things at once can help us to accomplish all the tasks...why is the dog blue honey?.....that need to be done in any given day without having to....it's ok baby we just need an ice pack...put it off until tomorrow. So to sum things, multitasking does come in handy when you need to accomplish many things at once. Thanks to my ability to multitask I was able to flawlessly..not now sweetie..write this post while watching the kids. Now please excuse me while I wash my hands. - if you liked what you read please click the little alien below to share this post with the world. It's free I promise :)